“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder, Amazon.
This quote resonates deeply in today’s business landscape, where customer experience reigns supreme. While price remains a consideration, outstanding customer service has emerged as a critical differentiator. In fact, in a recent Hiver survey, a staggering 72% of customers reported switching brands after just a single negative experience. Moreover, over half of customers (52%) expect their issues to be resolved within 24 hours. These statistics underscore a clear message: customers prioritize memorable, effortless experiences.
To meet these heightened expectations and truly excel in customer care, businesses need to strategically invest in the right technologies. These tools should not only enhance team efficiency and empower smart work, but also ultimately contribute to creating world-class experiences for every customer. Therefore, we have compiled a list of ten must-have customer care tools. Let’s explore each tool, understand its value proposition, and discover how it can significantly benefit your business.
Table of Contents
Understanding Customer Support Tools
A customer support tool is essentially technology designed to streamline and optimize how support teams manage and respond to customer inquiries, complaints, and requests promptly and effectively. As businesses grow, so does their customer base, inevitably leading to an increased volume of support queries. This is where customer support tools become indispensable. They provide the necessary infrastructure to manage scalability efficiently.
These tools are not just about managing volume; they are about enhancing the entire customer experience. They reduce the burden on support staff, making their work more manageable, and simultaneously simplify the process for customers to seek assistance.
This article will delve into a comprehensive suite of support tools, from essential email helpdesks to dynamic live chat solutions and robust knowledge base systems, providing a well-rounded view of what constitutes a Must-have Customer Care Tool List.
10 Essential Customer Care Tools: Your Must-Have List
We’ve undertaken extensive research to bring you a curated selection of top-tier tools that are crucial for any business aiming to elevate its customer care strategy. Here’s our definitive list:
| Tool Category | Description | Examples | Why It’s Must-Have |
|---|---|---|---|
| Help Desk Ticketing System | Centralizes, organizes, and tracks customer queries from various channels. | Hiver, Zoho Desk, Zendesk | Ensures no query is missed, streamlines workflows, and improves response times. |
| Knowledge Base Software | Empowers customers with self-service through FAQs, tutorials, and guides. | Hiver, ProProfs, Helpjuice | Reduces support load, provides instant answers, and enhances customer autonomy. |
| Live Chat Software | Enables real-time engagement and immediate support directly on websites or apps. | Hiver, Pure Chat, ThriveDesk, ProProfsChat, LiveChat | Boosts customer engagement, increases sales conversions, and offers instant assistance. |
| Social Listening and Monitoring Tool | Monitors social media for brand mentions and customer sentiment. | Hootsuite, Sprout Social | Proactively manages brand reputation, identifies issues, and engages with customers on social platforms. |
| Customer Feedback Survey Tool | Collects valuable feedback using surveys and metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES. | SurveyMonkey, Typeform | Measures customer satisfaction, identifies areas for improvement, and drives customer-centric strategies. |
| Internal Communication Software | Facilitates seamless and contextual communication within support teams and across departments. | Slack, Microsoft Teams, Hiver’s Email Notes | Improves collaboration, speeds up issue resolution, and enhances team coordination. |
| Project Management Tool | Organizes tasks, prioritizes workflows, and tracks progress across customer communication channels. | ClickUp, ClientVenue, Asana, Timely Time Tracker | Enhances team efficiency, manages complex queries, and ensures timely task completion. |
| Reporting Dashboard | Provides comprehensive analytics and interactive dashboards to monitor key customer support metrics. | Hiver’s Reporting and Analytics, Qualtrics, Databox | Tracks performance, identifies trends, and makes data-driven decisions to optimize support operations. |
| Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software | Manages customer interactions, stores customer data, and provides a holistic view of customer relationships. | HubSpot, Salesforce | Personalizes customer interactions, improves customer understanding, and fosters long-term relationships. |
| AI Email Management Software | Utilizes AI to sort, prioritize, and assist in responding to emails efficiently. | Intercom, Sanebox | Streamlines email management, reduces response times, and enhances email support efficiency. |
1. Help Desk Ticketing System: Centralize Customer Queries
Are your customer messages scattered across multiple channels like email, live chat, social media, and phone calls? If so, a help desk ticketing system is an indispensable tool in your must-have customer care tool list. This system acts as a central hub to consolidate, assign, and meticulously track all incoming customer queries, regardless of the channel they originate from.
A robust help desk ticketing system empowers customer service teams to efficiently log support tickets, streamline support workflows, automate the distribution of tickets to the appropriate agents, and foster seamless collaboration. This collaborative environment is crucial for minimizing response times and consistently delivering outstanding customer service. For instance, implementing a dedicated customer service email management software can dramatically improve your team’s productivity by effectively organizing and prioritizing the influx of emails.
Popular help desk software options include industry leaders like Zendesk and Zoho Desk, alongside user-friendly solutions such as Hiver. Hiver stands out particularly for its ease of use and rapid setup within minutes, integrating directly within Gmail. This eliminates the learning curve associated with new software adoption, making it a seamless addition to your team’s workflow.
2. Knowledge Base Software: Empower Self-Service
In today’s digital age, customers are increasingly inclined to seek answers independently online. “Googling it” has become the default first step for many when encountering an issue. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, a significant 81% of customers across various industries attempt to resolve issues on their own before reaching out to a live representative.
Investing in knowledge base software is a strategic move for any business focused on customer care. This tool enables you to create, efficiently manage, and readily share self-service content. This content can take various forms, including comprehensive FAQ pages, informative how-to videos, and detailed step-by-step tutorials. One of the most significant advantages of a knowledge base is its ability to substantially reduce the workload on your support team, as customers can find solutions and answers themselves.
Furthermore, your support team can leverage the knowledge base as a valuable resource when addressing common inquiries. This not only accelerates response times, as agents don’t need to devise solutions from scratch, but also ensures consistency and accuracy in the information provided to customers.
For businesses looking to implement a knowledge base, Hiver, ProProfs, and Helpjuice are highly recommended options, each offering robust features and user-friendly interfaces.
3. Live Chat Software: Real-Time Customer Engagement
Live chat software is another essential addition to your must-have customer care tool list. Its significance in modern customer service cannot be overstated.
Consider these statistics from Invesp: customers who engage with businesses via live chat tend to spend 60% more per purchase compared to those who do not. Moreover, a striking 77% of customers are likely to abandon a purchase if live chat support is not available. These figures highlight the profound impact of live chat on both customer experience and business outcomes.
Live chat functionality enables you to engage with your customers in real-time, whether they are browsing your website or using your mobile app. It facilitates immediate and proactive support, addressing customer needs at the moment they arise.
However, it’s crucial to recognize that a poorly implemented live chat experience can be more detrimental than having no live chat at all. To help ensure you leverage live chat effectively, it’s important to adhere to best practices.
Popular live chat software options include Hiver, Pure Chat, ThriveDesk, ProProfsChat, and LiveChat, each offering a range of features to enhance real-time customer interaction.
4. Social Listening and Monitoring Tool: Brand Sentiment Insights
Are you actively monitoring online conversations about your brand? Do you have a clear understanding of how customers perceive your products and services on social media platforms? If not, social listening and monitoring tools are crucial for your must-have customer care tool list.
These tools are invaluable for tracking brand sentiment across your customer base. By utilizing social listening tools, you can closely monitor what customers are saying about your brand, as well as your competitors. This insight allows you to tailor more personalized experiences and proactively address customer concerns. Monitoring brand mentions also enables you to quickly identify and respond to customer complaints before they escalate into widespread negative feedback.
For social listening and monitoring, Hootsuite and Sprout Social are highly recommended tools. They offer robust features for tracking brand mentions, analyzing sentiment, and engaging with your audience on social media.
5. Customer Feedback Survey Tool: Capture Customer Insights
Customer feedback surveys, a time-tested method, remain one of the most effective tools for gathering direct customer insights. Understanding your customers is paramount to success, extending to crucial decisions like choosing a tech stack. Deploying customer feedback surveys to gauge customer opinions on your products and services provides invaluable insights into product development, support quality, and overall performance.
Soliciting and acting upon customer feedback is highly beneficial for businesses, directly impacting customer satisfaction and loyalty. Typically, customer feedback surveys are structured around specific metrics, including Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score, and Customer Effort Score (CES). These customer experience metrics provide quantifiable data on customer perceptions and experiences.
SurveyMonkey and Typeform are two widely used and highly effective tools for creating and distributing customer feedback surveys. They offer user-friendly interfaces and robust features for designing, sending, and analyzing survey data.
6. Internal Communication Software: Streamline Team Collaboration
Customer support teams frequently need to collaborate with other internal teams to effectively resolve customer queries. Therefore, equipping your support team with an easy-to-use internal communication tool is vital and earns its place on the must-have customer care tool list. Supplementing this with tools like a screen recorder can further enhance communication clarity.
The primary advantage of internal communication software is that it enables frontline agents to engage in quick, contextual discussions with colleagues within their team and across different departments. This facilitates faster problem-solving and more efficient information sharing.
Hiver’s Email Notes is an excellent example of such a tool. It allows agents to directly tag and message anyone within the organization for input and assistance, eliminating the need for lengthy email chains. This significantly reduces communication clutter and streamlines internal workflows.
Other effective internal communication tools include widely adopted platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, as well as specialized solutions like Fellow.app.
7. Project Management Tool: Organize Support Workflows
Delivering exceptional customer service hinges on your team’s ability to manage multiple projects and tasks concurrently. This necessitates a project management tool, making it a key component of your must-have customer care tool list. Such a tool helps you organize, prioritize, and track the progress of your team’s tasks across all customer communication channels.
In essence, you require 360-degree visibility into all ongoing support activities. A project management tool provides this by enabling you to share important documents, collaborate with multiple stakeholders involved in resolving customer issues, and track individual tasks and deadlines. This empowers support teams to stay organized and deliver timely, effective support.
For project management tools, highly recommended options include ClickUp, ClientVenue, Asana, and Timely Time Tracker. These tools offer robust features for task management, collaboration, and workflow organization, tailored to the needs of customer support teams.
Pro tip: For users of Asana, integrating it with Hiver allows you to manage and track projects directly within your Gmail interface, further streamlining workflows.
8. Reporting Dashboard: Data-Driven Support Optimization
The most effective way to evaluate and enhance the quality of your customer support is through interactive reporting dashboards that visualize critical metrics. These metrics provide detailed insights into your support team’s performance, customer interactions, and the impact on broader business outcomes like customer loyalty and retention. A reporting dashboard is therefore a crucial element of a must-have customer care tool list.
Robust and in-depth analytics are essential, enabling you to dissect data according to your specific needs and conduct thorough, detailed analyses. This level of analytical capability is vital for identifying trends, understanding performance bottlenecks, and making informed decisions to improve support operations.
This is precisely what Vacasa, a global vacation rental management company, experienced. By implementing Hiver’s analytics dashboard, their teams achieved an impressive 80% reduction in support email handling time.
Other recommended tools for data analysis and creating comprehensive customer service reports include Qualtrics and Databox.
Did You Know: The Customer Service Software Market is projected to reach USD 58.1 Billion by 2030, according to Acumen Research and Consulting, indicating the growing importance of these tools.
9. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: Holistic Customer View
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is designed to facilitate seamless management of customer interactions across all touchpoints within an organization. For customer support teams, CRM software is invaluable for storing customer details, recording customer queries, and tracking the progress of support issues. This makes CRM software a vital component of any must-have customer care tool list.
Furthermore, a CRM provides a centralized database, granting multiple team members access to critical customer information. This includes past orders, chat histories, ongoing requests, and any other relevant customer data.
By centralizing customer data, a CRM ensures that information about every customer interaction is readily available to any team member who needs it. This accessibility not only enhances efficiency but also positively impacts key metrics like customer retention. In fact, investing in a CRM can boost customer retention rates by as much as 27%!
Popular CRM systems include HubSpot and Salesforce, renowned for their comprehensive features and scalability. For businesses in the B2B sector, tools like TinyEmail can be beneficial for prospecting and lead management.
10. AI Email Management Tools: Intelligent Email Handling
AI-powered email management tools represent the cutting edge in customer care technology and are increasingly becoming a must-have customer care tool. These tools leverage artificial intelligence to assist teams in sorting, prioritizing, and responding to emails with greater efficiency and ease. They are instrumental in streamlining both internal and external communication, enhancing visibility, and promoting ownership across support teams. Moreover, these AI systems are designed to learn from user behavior over time, becoming progressively more adept at predicting preferences and anticipating needs.
Sanebox is a prime example of sophisticated AI email management software. Intercom is another highly regarded tool with powerful AI capabilities, offering intelligent email handling features to optimize customer support workflows.
Recommended Read: 8 Best AI Email Management Tools in 2025
Customer Care Tools: Setting Your Team for Success
Implementing a strategic mix of these customer care tools is essential for empowering your teams and driving efficiency. Whether it’s a help desk system to streamline customer requests or a feedback tool to gather valuable insights, the ultimate objective should always be to delight customers and create memorable experiences. In line with enhancing team efficiency, selecting appropriate board management software is also crucial for effective decision-making and governance, especially in today’s dynamic business environment.
If your business utilizes Google Workspace and you are seeking the ideal customer service software to support your customers, Hiver is perfectly tailored to your needs.
Hiver, recognized as the world’s first help desk built specifically for Google Workspace, empowers numerous global brands to deliver fast and personalized customer service directly from their Gmail inboxes. Furthermore, Hiver includes built-in analytics, live chat, CSAT surveys, collaboration features, and automation functionalities, all within a unified platform.
Interested in exploring how Hiver can transform your customer service operations? Start your free 7-day trial of Hiver today!
FAQs
- How does a help desk ticketing system benefit customer service teams?
- A help desk ticketing system centralizes, assigns, and tracks all customer queries. It streamlines support workflows, automates ticket routing, and facilitates collaborative efforts to reduce response time and enhance customer service.
- Why is Hiver recommended as a help desk software in this article?
- Hiver is recommended for its user-friendly interface, quick setup within Gmail, and comprehensive features that enable support teams to manage customer queries efficiently within their existing email environment.
- What is the role of knowledge base software in customer support, and which tools are recommended?
- Knowledge base software enables customer self-service through FAQs, videos, and tutorials, significantly reducing the workload on support teams. Recommended tools include Hiver, ProProfs, and Helpjuice.
- Why is live chat software considered essential for customer support?
- Live chat software facilitates real-time communication, leading to increased customer engagement and higher purchase values. Statistics show that customers using live chat spend more and are more likely to complete a purchase if live chat support is available. Examples include Hiver, Pure Chat, ThriveDesk, ProProfsChat, and LiveChat.
- How do social listening and monitoring tools contribute to customer support effectiveness?
- Social listening and monitoring tools help track brand sentiment and online conversations, enabling businesses to provide more personalized experiences and respond promptly to customer feedback and concerns on social media platforms. Hootsuite and Sprout Social are recommended tools.
- What is the importance of customer feedback surveys, and which tools are suggested for conducting them?
- Customer feedback surveys are crucial for gathering direct customer insights into product and support quality. SurveyMonkey and Typeform are suggested as effective tools for creating and distributing follow-up feedback surveys.
- How does internal communication software, such as Hiver’s Email Notes, enhance customer support efficiency?
- Internal communication software facilitates quick and contextual discussions within support teams and across departments, reducing reliance on traditional emails and minimizing communication clutter. Hiver’s Email Notes is highlighted as a tool for efficient team collaboration.
- Why is the use of a project management tool emphasized in customer support contexts?
- A project management tool is essential for organizing, prioritizing, and tracking tasks across various communication channels, providing a 360-degree view of support team activities. Recommended tools include ClickUp, ClientVenue, Asana, and Timely Time Tracker.
- What role does a reporting dashboard play in customer support, and which tools are recommended for reporting?
- A reporting dashboard provides interactive insights into key customer support metrics, aiding in performance analysis and optimization. Hiver’s Reporting and Analytics, Qualtrics, and Databox are recommended tools for creating customer service reports.
- How does Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software contribute to customer support, and which popular CRMs are mentioned?
- CRM software helps manage customer interactions, store customer details, and enhance the accessibility of customer information across teams. HubSpot and Salesforce are cited as popular and effective CRM examples.
- What makes Hiver unique as a customer service tool, especially for Google Workspace users?
- Hiver is uniquely designed for Google Workspace, operating directly within Gmail. It provides fast and personalized customer service with features like analytics, live chat, CSAT surveys, collaboration, and automation functionalities, all integrated into the Gmail interface.
- How can businesses explore Hiver, and what is the offered trial?
- Businesses can explore Hiver by signing up for a free 7-day trial. This trial allows users to experience Hiver’s capabilities for delivering efficient and personalized customer service directly from Gmail.
