Your customers want the ability to engage with your business using their favorite online channels. The problem is: there are always going to be new channels, and the ones which are the most popular at a given moment are always shifting. According to Accenture, 87% of organizations believe that traditional experiences are no longer enough to satisfy their customers. But to keep up with evolving customer expectations — and your competition — you must continually add new support channels. And you must unify those channels, especially as the volume increases, to keep it manageable for your agents.

As you reimagine your support strategy to adapt to these changes, and begin taking steps to make your organization more comprehensive and competitive, free customer service software can make all the difference. Of course, you’ll want a solution that makes it easy to upgrade and take on more complexity as your team’s needs advance. But to get started, the right free tool must be able to help you rise to meet modern customer expectations — and deliver better employee and customer experiences.

Here’s what to look for when choosing the best free customer service software for your business.

Free customer service software should be simple to set up and deploy

When evaluating your options for free support software, fast and easy implementation should be at the top of your list of requirements. Speed and simplicity are important features of any customer support tool, but particularly when you are using a free solution, you need to be able to get up and running quickly — without long implementation periods or lots of back and forth with the vendor’s support team.

Look for free customer support software that is built to be out-of-the-box, has a drag-and-drop interface, and doesn’t require any coding to get started. Find out which tools let you add new channels in minutes, rather than days. And prioritize solutions that provide automated ticket queues, responses, and case routing for greater efficiency, and that make it easy to quickly add new users, teams, and skills so you can align the right agents or teams best suited to deliver a great experience for each customer.

Your agents should like using it

One extremely important requirement for free customer service software is easy to overlook: your agents should actually want to use it. If it’s too clunky or confusing, they’ll waste time trying to accomplish simple tasks and won’t be able to take advantage of its full capabilities. Turnover is already high in call centers, and an aggravating, time-consuming experience using work systems can make the problem worse.

Employee happiness is directly impacted by the tools they use everyday. Your agents’ online experiences outside of work have raised their expectations for work-related software solutions as well. If there’s too much of a disparity between the usability and sophistication of the technology your agents use in their personal lives, and what you require them to use to perform their jobs, they will quickly become frustrated and lose productivity.

Customer service software needs to be powerful, yet easy to use. It should free up your agents’ time and attention, and empower them to focus on delivering the best responses to customers. Look for a solution that has a single dashboard to manage — no switching back and forth — and provides a unified view of a customer’s case history.

A lack of effective coaching can increase attrition too, so your tool should also offer an AI-powered knowledge base that makes recommendations and surfaces articles to help guide agents when they’re having a hard time troubleshooting a case.

Free customer service software should offer robust reporting

Just because a solution is free, doesn’t mean you should accept limited reporting capabilities. The tool you choose should provide both managers and agents with insights that improve their productivity and performance. Look for free customer support software that uses AI to identify and categorize the top reasons that customers are contacting your business. The solution should also provide insight into customer sentiment and CSAT across channels, and provide real-time conversation analytics to help automate quality and agent performance management.

Sprinklr Modern Care Lite is an out-of-the-box, enterprise-grade contact center solution you can roll out in just minutes — freeing your managers up to focus on better meeting customers’ expectations, instead of digging through reports or training your teams.

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