4 Digital Tools Modern Support Organizations Need

The world is flat. Not literally, of course, but in terms of how teams communicate with one another, stay on task, and reach shared goals. Today’s digital workplace connects people so seamlessly that previously enormous obstacles like physical distance and time zones are practically inconsequential. Innovations in technology have advanced all aspects of an organization but these changes’ immediate benefit is perhaps no more pronounced than in the customer support field.

Today’s leading support platforms help customers answer their own questions, empower support agents to resolve issues faster, keep teams situated around the world aligned across the organization, and make onboarding and managing new team members a breeze. In today’s digital workspace, customer support teams play a crucial role in growing a brand, retaining customers, and creating lifetime value.

In that vein, we’ve roundup some of the top digital tools that every modern support organization should know about and consider using.

Customer Service Solutions

While sales, marketing, content, and virtually every other team likely views Microsoft Office as indispensable, the same can be said for support teams and their customer service solution platforms.

These platforms are the hub of the day-to-day activity for most service teams because they make it simple for service agents to manage inbound requests, communicate with customers (internally and externally), view and organize tickets, and get insights into the performance of the helpdesk. A large category, the offerings run the gamut: from small business solutions that can used by anyone in the organization, to end-to-end solutions designed for giant enterprises.

Companies that do this: ServiceNow, Zendesk, Salesforce, Pegasystems

Access Management

It’s not unusual for a support agent to access 8-12 different tools in an attempt to solve a support problem. This makes the simple act of identity verification within an organization a positively Sisyphean task. That’s where single sign-on tools come into play.

Single sign-on (SSO) platforms offer a range of authentication and registration methods so you can tailor a secure, single sign-on customer experience with a centralized system to effectively manage all of your customer identities. Customer support agents instantly have secure, simple access to the tools they need and a centralized admin view to manage all authentication, authorization, and user management needs.

Companies that do this: Okta, OneLogin, Duo Security, ForgeRock

Collaboration

You may subscribe to a daily news brief or a morning email send from your favorite website. That’s sort of the idea behind this category, except their updates are designed as a sort of daily touch-base across all teams and channels to ensure everyone is operating on the same wavelength.

These tools are great at sending daily updates on things like bugs, new support documents, general news, and new best practices to ensure no information is lost and no agent is left behind. Plus, some offer task management tools make it easy to assign, manage, and follow up on tasks, as well as manage complex support projects from start to finish.

Companies that do this: Basecamp, Jira, Asana

Live Chat

No more forms! This is the plea from customers everywhere. Enter live chat. From AI-driven chat bots that do their best to answer customer questions intelligently, to a platform that connects the consumer to a live agent, chat platforms are becoming commonplace. Great at helping support organizations ‘shift left,’ chatbots are an inexpensive and scalable way to provide users a better support experience.

Companies that do this: LiveChat, Intercom, Tawk

In the end, these tools, and the many others like them, become more useful when their data is accessible across different platforms, teams and individual agents. Attivio helps businesses unify their data silos in order to make their collective knowledge searchable and actionable.

If you find that important information is getting stuck in one, or many of these types of platforms, we’d love to chat with you about our solution.