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Why You Need A Service CRM: Top 7 Best Software

Why You Need A Service CRM: Top 7 Best Software

By Lucas Brachet

Published: March 15, 2023

Today, excellent customer service is a key component of setting yourself apart from competition and retaining your customers. In this article, we tell you all about the best service CRM systems available on the market for you to provide outstanding customer experience and generate revenues.

In order to help you choose the right Service CRM software for your business, we have reviewed and compared 7 systems known for their customer support features and tools.

What Is A Service CRM?

As the number of interactions between customers and businesses has increased with the use of smartphones and social media, the challenge of collecting and organizing data has also gotten bigger. Real-time access to data is now absolutely critical for multi-channel customer support services, and CRM systems ensure that all interactions and information are easily accessible by team members in one single location.

Why Use A CRM For Customer Service?

Customer service and CRM go hand in hand.

While CSS software is designed to provide customer service and support, using a CRM system to handle customer service allows your customer service team to work together with marketing and sales teams all along the customer’s journey.

Overall, using a CRM software for customer service allows your teams to provide outstanding customer experience which translates into more returning customers, higher customer retention, and down the line, increased revenues.

Salesforce

Sales Cloud is a cloud-based software that helps teams work better together. They provide a single Customer 360 app, or a combination of many, such as Service Cloud. With Salesforce, your support team can see all your customers’ information and previous interactions in one place. It helps team members better deliver personalized and outstanding customer service. Salesforce also helps with resolving issues faster.

Benefits and Best Features

  • Automation & Workflows.
  • Case management.
  • Omni-Channel Routing to rout cases to the right agent.
  • Customer Service Incident Management.
  • Real-time visual support.
  • Chatbot and instant messaging services.

This video will help you understand how Salesforce can help your business improve customer service on a daily basis.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Many useful features that allow you to communicate with customers through email, web forms, chat, and social media.
  • Easily customizable platform.
  • Simple API integrations with other third party systems.

Cons

  • Could benefit from better email functionality.
  • Some features can be too expensive.

Hubspot CRM

Hubspot CRM provides its own customer service software called Service Hub. It is designed to connect all your customer service data and channels on a single CRM platform, so you can easily support, retain, and grow your customer base. This system will help your business improve customer service management so you stand out from competition at every stage of the customer journey.

Benefits and Best Features

  • Reporting/Analytics.
  • Third Party Integration.
  • Chat/Messaging - can turn chats and emails into actionable tickets.
  • Self-service resolutions with custom Helpdesk.
  • Feedback tool.
  • Conversations inbox to help all team members collaborate and get a contextual overview of a customer's history and previous interactions.
  • Multi-Channel Communication.

You can quickly find out about everything Hubspot Service Hub has to offer in this video.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Easy to use, clear, and customizable.
  • Great Knowledge Base.
  • Can be purchased alone.
  • Integration into your HubSpot sales and marketing hubs.
  • Easy-to-use reporting.

Cons

  • A multi-language Knowledge Base could be useful.
  • Ticketing functionality could still be improved.
  • More automation features could be useful.

Maximizer

Maximizer CRM is an integrated CRM system that is suitable for businesses of all sizes across various industries. Maximizer is designed to help your business retain customers by deploying processes that ensure a smooth and repeatable renewal journey.

Benefits and Best Features

  • Customer Case Management.
  • Online Service Index/knowledge-based tab: custom instantaneous searchable online archive of information for your clients.
  • Customer Self Service.
  • Computer Telephony Integration (CTI): Maximizer can be integrated with a phone system to display any relevant contact information and previous correspondence with the client.
  • Live information and automated data graphs regarding customer service metrics can be displayed through dashboards, reports, and alerts.

Find out more about Maximizer in this video.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Easily accessible: cloud based software.
  • Customizable to meet your needs.
  • Intuitive interface.
  • Great to handle Customer Service cases.

Cons

  • Email integration could be smoother.
  • Large data management could be better optimized.
  • Remote sync can be slow at times.

Freshsales

Freshworks offers several tools to help businesses with sales management and customer engagement. Freshsales is a cloud-based solution you can integrate with Freshdesk to create a unified view of the customer for your sales and support teams. This CRM system gives you everything you need to foster strong customer relationships with multichannel communication.

Benefits and Best Features

  • Details about your customers are automatically enriched with conversations, deals (open, won, or lost), and touchpoints. You can also view the tasks and scheduled appointments.
  • Great for collaboration to quickly and efficiently solve customer issues.
  • Possibility to automate repetitive helpdesk tasks to improve productivity.

Watch this video to discover how you can use Freshsales/Freshdesk to satisfy your customers.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Customer 360 for context on customers.
  • Multichannel communication (email, phone, whatsapp business, chat, apple business chat, SMS…).
  • Prioritize, categorize, and assign tickets so you never lose track of them.
  • Plenty of features to help customer support teams.

Cons

  • You will need a bit of training to be able to optimize this CRM system.
  • The bots could be improved.
  • Could benefit from better app integration.

Creatio

Creatio is an intelligent service management platform that provides a single database of all your accounts and contacts. This system helps you keep track of contact data, service history, social media profiles, and the entire history of interactions in order for your business to provide the best possible customer experience.

Benefits and Best Features

  • 360° Customer view.
  • You can communicate with your team and customers directly from the system.
  • Each team member has their own interface to monitor their performance and tasks.
  • Creatio allows you to assign cases, regulate timelines for case resolution and manage communications during case resolution.
  • Knowledge management.
  • Synchronization and integration.
  • Analytics and reporting capabilities.

Watch this video to find out more about Service Creatio.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Omnichannel communications.
  • Great for workflow management.
  • Excellent data visualization.
  • Extensive integration options.

Cons

  • Documentation could sometimes be more intuitive.
  • More customization capabilities would be helpful.
  • Performance issues at times.
  • Not completely user-friendly yet.

Zoho

Zoho CRM is a CRM system that aims to help businesses engage with their customers. This CRM program provides your business with a wide range of tools to communicate better at the right time and through the right channel with your prospects and clients. Zoho CRM helps you benefit from omni-channel presence, segmentation, KPIs, predictive intelligence, and more to deliver personalized experiences and retain your customers.

Benefits and Best Features

  • Omnichannel presence that helps better follow up with customers (email, phone calls, chat, Facebook, Twitter, and more).
  • Zia - Artificial Intelligence chatbot that can recognize the sentiments of customers from their emails. It is able to communicate with visitors with text and voice.
  • In-depth analytics.
  • Good integration with third-party business applications.

Watch this video and discover how Zoho helps businesses improve customer service.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Highly customizable.
  • Good chatbot.
  • Efficient customer support features.
  • Works offline.

Cons

  • Not very intuitive or easy to use.
  • Automation is limited to the enterprise version.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a cloud-based CRM solution that provides a complete customer service solution. It offers customizable tools to build customer service portal, a knowledge base, and online communities. It is easy to use and scales with your business. Zendesk is used across a wide range of vertical markets including technology, government, media, and retail, from small to large.

Benefits and Best Features

  • Provides many tutorials and support material to help your teams quickly learn how to use it.
  • Uses AI and bots to give customers instant answers.
  • Provides a help center with articles for self-service support.
  • Live chat.
  • Integration with applications like Salesforce and Google Analytics.

Find out more about Zendesk Support in this video.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Very easy to set-up and can be up and running in a day.
  • Customizable.
  • Unified, modern-looking platform.

Cons

  • Limited automation features.
  • Prices on the higher side.
  • Powerful API, but sometimes a bit difficult to use.

Service CRM: your key take-aways

If there’s one thing you need to remember from this article, it’s that a great service CRM system not only makes things easier and less frustrating for your customers but also sets your teams up for success and improves your business workflows.