14.12.2017
Customer Service

When you’re in business, the product or service you’re selling is probably what you focus on the most. But who are you improving for, marketing to, and selling to? The customer.

Even when you break it down into smaller more manageable chunks, customer service is still a tough nut to crack that probably uses up a lot of your business’s resources and time. However, it’s vital that you invest in customer service. It costs a lot to get a customer the first time - great customer service keeps them coming back and gets them talking you up to their friends and colleagues.

It’s time you starting putting some tools to work to help you make your customer service easier and more effective. Instead of dreading customer relationship management, these tools stack, integrate, and automate to streamline the whole process and let you get back to what you love - obsessing over your product or service and making it even better.

ShipStation

If you do most of your sales online, managing all of your orders can quickly get out of control. A missed order is missed revenue (and a seriously unhappy customer). ShipStation assists with that by allowing you to track every order no matter where it comes from. This means you can operate multiple eCommerce sites, but use only one backend system to manage all of those orders. That way nothing is ever lost and all of those orders are packaged and shipped as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Bold Commerce

This tool is perfect for those who offer subscription services on recurring orders. Bold Commerce’s app works with Shopify to make it easy to manage monthly subscriptions. You can use this tool to set up subscriptions, manage and market them, and so much more. If you use Shopify you need this app; if you’re not, this might be the incentive you need to switch. And if customers modifying or cancelling orders is an issue, this will seriously improve that process. With Bold Commerce streamlining the whole process for you, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.

FreshBooks

Accounting is another task that many small business owners find intimidating, but when you’re just starting out you may not have the resources to bring in a full-time number-cruncher. Fortunately, FreshBooks can help. This accounting app makes it easy for small business owners to manage their billing, estimates, payables, and more. It can even be synced with a number of other tools, including MailChimp, to make it possible to connect your invoicing and finances to your other customer data and communications.

MailChimp

MailChimp keeps you in contact with your customers through email campaigns and other marketing tools. Everything is as automated as possible so there’s less work for you. You can create custom email campaigns, set them to go out automatically to specific customers, create drip campaigns for marketing, and much more. With a variety of options for design, embeds, and more, you’ll love how professional it makes your business looks and all of the ways it lets you communicate. Many of the other tools listed here can be integrated with MailChimp to keep everything in one place.

Zadarma

Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP tools help you to communicate seamlessly with your clients. While SMS and emails are the new norms of communication, nothing replaces a one-on-one phone call for improving customer relationships. With Zadarma, when customers call into your customer service line, they don’t realize that they’re using a VoIP phone number. These virtual numbers aren’t tied to a particular handset or even to a particular location.

Zadarma‘s Cloud PBX is located on the provider's servers thus completely eliminating the need to purchase special hardware or equipment. Since the calls are routed through the internet, you can answer them at any location. Customer service from poolside? You can have it with Zadarma. And with better call routing, customers get the person they’re looking for the first time. That means less frustration for everyone.

Customers don’t care how much we know but they do want to know if we care. They don’t expect us to be perfect but they do want us to solve their problems. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said it best: “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.”

With these amazing and affordable tools, you can start today making your customer’s every interaction with your company better, more effective, and more memorable in the best possible way.