There are so many tools that customer support and success teams use it’s impossible to keep track of them all. You may know the heavy hitters, Zendesk, JIRA, Salesforce but what about Crystal Knows or Intercom.
What is the product, what can you do with it and do you even need to use it? Or there might be something that would solve a problem you’ve been trying to fix for years, how do you find it?
This is the guide from the Boston CSxCS community of what they’re using, how they’re using it and what problem it solves.
Where to do research
If you need to get information on a tool that we don’t have listed these are some good sources to reference.
| Software Advice | Software reviews and research | http://www.softwareadvice.com/ |
| Product Hunt | Curated product releases | https://www.producthunt.com/ |
| alternativeTo | Crowdsources product replacement recommendations | http://alternativeto.net/ |
Tools
| Name | Purpose | Description |
| Asana | Project and task management | Asana is a cloud-based project and task management solution that enables companies to manage and organize tasks and projects, communicate and collaborate. |
| JIRA | Bug tracking, issue management, and project management. JIRA Service Desk, Customer ticketing system and portal | JIRA is a bug tracking and project tracking tool designed for development teams. It offers workflow, reporting and automation features and can be used as a SaaS or locally hosted product. |
| HipChat | Team and group messaging product | HipChat is a instant messaging platform with real time communication, video and group chat features. |
| Magento | E-commerce | Magento is an e-commerce software and platform. It has promotion, management of orders, payments, and customer service functionality. |
| Evergage | Behavior tracking and customization | Evergage is a cloud-based platform with real-time personalization and behavioral analytics including A/B testing for content. |
| Zendesk | Support ticketing and knowledge base tool | Zendesk is a support ticketing and communication platform with ticket tracking reporting and knowledge base features. |
| Salesforce | Sales lead tracking and management tool | Web-based CRM for sales, service, marketing, and call center operations that allows users to manage customer relationships and customer satisfaction. |
| Hubspot | Inbound marketing | Hubspot is a marketing tool. It’s website management tool, allows users to control and optimize content, including blog material. Its search engine optimization tools provide tips and tricks to both improve search rankings and increase lead quality. Users can also manage email outreach and social media. |
| Hubspot CRM | Customer relationship tracking | Hubspot CRM allows it’s users to organize and track sales prospect and client interactions. |
| Intercom | Customer communication and information tracking | Intercom allows users to see who is using their product (the user’s region, browser, local time etc.) and to communicate with them through targeted, behavior-driven email and in-app messages. |
| Help Scout | Support ticketing and communication | Help Scout is a customer communication tool that uses a shared inbox and offers form embed and knowledge base functionality. |
| Delighted | NPS and customer feedback | Delighted is an NPS customer feedback system that enables you to quickly and easily gather actionable feedback from your customers. Use Delighted to send multiple surveys to different customer groups, and collect responses to NPS questions. The system automatically calculates your NPS using the data collected. Segment your data across different categories, surveys and customer profiles. You can also visually show your data in graph format, making it easier to digest and find actionable insights. |
| Slack | Team communication | Slack is a team interaction tool designed to facilitate communication across the company. Public channels enable conversation between members across the organization. Private channels can be created for interaction within smaller teams, and direct messages can be sent to certain colleagues. PDFs, images and documents can be shared across all channel types. Users will receive a notification of messages sent to them, and can customize their notification settings. Slack integrates with most other web apps/tools as well as social media to provide live feed updates. |
| Trello | Project management | Trello is a visual collaboration tool for managing team projects and personal tasks. It can be used across the entire organization, not just by agile development teams. The interface is presented as a card wall separated into different boards.The cards represent the tasks of a project, and users can drag-and-drop the cards from board to board to indicate the status of the task or project. |
| Google Apps (Sheets, Docs, Forms, Gmail) | Document creation, information tracking, communication | Google products provide smart editing and styling tools to help you easily create and format documents, spreadsheets and forms/questionnaires. All files can be easily shared with others via email address. Sharing settings enable multiple users to view, edit and make comments on the same working document. |
| Looker | Business intelligence | Looker is a business intelligence and data analytics tool. Real-time company data is made easily accessible across the entire organization, and users do not need to have experienced data analytics or SQL knowledge. The dashboards on the platform are easy to build and allow for customizable charts, graphs and reports so that you can drill down into big data. |
| Owler | Sales intelligence | Owler is a competitive intelligence platform with news, reports, and metrics on your company and competitors. |
| Feedly | Content discovery | Feedly is a platform that helps you to discover, organize, share, save and search content. Keep up to date with stories on your field, industry and organization. Feedly features shared collections that allow you to share what you read with colleagues and networks, and discover what other thought leaders and teammates read. Knowledge boards enable teammates to collaboratively curate, comment, and prioritize the best stories about specific topics and ideas. |
| Crystal Knows | User and sales intelligence | Crystal is an online profile search tool that gives you instant access to millions of personality profiles and free communication advice for anyone you meet. You can quickly view personality insights on sites such as LinkedIn, Gmail, and Salesforce to understand the people you communicate with and build relationships. |