While one software will be the best solution for one company, it may be completely unsuitable for others. And in this case, it’s rather not about the quality of the platforms themselves but about

to what extent the company can understand and specify its needs for customer support and how clearly can find the most appropriate solution for itself. It’s important to understand that every business has different needs and has different objectives. For example, while one company may be content with simpler software for chat aggregation only, others may need a comprehensive solution that supports multi-channel communication with the customer.

If you’re a complete beginner and you’re taking your first steps in automating your customer service and support, an effective first step of course is to just look at a couple of big brands that will find you on their own in a normal search. That way, you can understand what such systems might generally look like from the inside, what issues they potentially solve, and how much they might cost. This will provide a useful starting point for beginning to question yourself and your needs.

7 factors to consider when choosing a customer support system

• Your resources

One of the initial questions to be asked to yourself, not the market, is what resources might be allocated to such a solution. Since the market is extremely oversaturated, there have long been many options in different segments. There are expensive solutions with long-term commitments that require quite large expenses, so you need to rationally assess whether there is a need for such solutions. Such solutions are suitable for large companies with large teams in the support department, a large volume of traffic and requests from visitors and customers from different channels. Such solutions usually cover even more than automation and aggregation of customer communication, but also give a lot of functionality to analyze and optimize the marketing process and traffic.

• Your scope

The key factor is the scope of your current work expressed in the number of customers and their requests. The larger the scope, the more advanced the system will be required to efficiently cover your needs through automation, systematization and segmentation. Tools such as chatbots not only automate processing of more basic customer questions and requests, but also give agents more time and resources to qualitatively solve more complex and individual customer issues. That’s why automation tools are an important factor not only in the speed of service, but also in the quality of service of your customers’ more time-consuming tasks.

• Your team (size, how many agents will be required in the system, and whether it depends on the price)

Many offers allow you to adjust your subscription to the number of agents working on the platform. The number of employees in your support team is an important factor to decide on the system. Perhaps you are more suited to these options, where you can reduce your costs for the system by having fewer agents. This option would be optimal for smaller teams, with a small number of customer support agents.

• How connected are your departments within the company

The more closely linked the different departments within the company, the more likely it is that the all-in-one system will be the most optimal choice. Thus, marketing, reporting, and optimization processes can be done in the same place as customer support, creating a more detailed and informative picture of the customer profile and the customer’s path to purchasing and active loyalty. Also, it is always worth paying attention to the possibility of integrating the customer service system with your current tools, so that the exchange of information is as easy and fast as possible.

• Your audience (which channels matter/what channels are critically required)

The critical factor is your current customers and your audience. Their profile, their habits and needs largely determine your choice, since the main task is to create this communication in order to answer questions and solve issues and difficulties of the customer. It is extremely important to understand what channels your audience wants and can communicate through, where they are faster and where they are more comfortable, how many channels they can use simultaneously. Different solutions offer different sets of channels, some suggest select only the channels you need, thereby customizing your platform to the needs of your audience. Thus, a qualitative understanding of the current and potential audience shows exactly what channels are required and in what quantity. This is exactly what will allow you to check existing offers on the market by ticking a box. If the main channel for our customers cannot be offered to us, then we immediately reject this solution and look further.

• Level of expertise of our team, their technical training (how easy it will be for them to master a more complex system)

More complex systems with advanced functionality do cover many needs at once but can be more difficult for employees and agents to master. What’s important here is the solution that agents were previously working with and their knowledge of how advanced functionality is required in the new solution. The support factor within the platform also matters here, as well as whether it can provide you with training materials for agents and in what format. Whether there is a technical assistant or manager assigned, support hours and time, language and contact format. The more complex the system, the more critical it is to have trained agents and quality support to solve all issues in real time.

• Scalable and reducible

For many companies, an important factor is the seasonality of sales. There are situations where seasonal changes are so critical that a company needs to change the number of agents in customer support to handle all requests. For instance, travel business usually experiences a boom during the summer months of the year, so they may need to bring in additional support agents to respond to high amount of incoming requests. Similarly, digital commerce companies are always preparing for a sharp and noticeable increase in traffic and requests during seasonal discounts and discounted sales campaigns, such as Black Friday. For such companies, it is important to have the flexibility of software allowing increasing or decreasing the number of support agents in different situations. 

For small and emerging companies, flexibility can also be an important factor in choosing their software. It is always easier and simpler to scale already established processes within a familiar platform than to transfer all past and current data and processes to a new one. It’s good to know that the platform you choose can grow with you when it comes to supporting more and more customers.

At the moment there are more than 100 platforms and solutions on the market, each with its own pros and cons. Therefore, before choosing, it is necessary to shape a glimpse of the ideal customer support system for the objectives of your business and make a list of questions to be asked.