10 Best Customer Service Software & Tools For SMEs in 2021

The top 10 tools that can intelligently help you cover all aspects of your customer service.

Customer service is an integral part of every business, especially in these hard times amidst the global pandemic. You need to pay attention to all the little details that affect your customer service and reassess your existing customer service process to be able to adjust it for the best performance.

You also need all of the resources available that can help you effectively drive your customer service. Investing in tools and customer service software designed to be versatile and compliant to the new contactless reality is a must. However, it can be hard to choose among many options on the market, since some of them have a hefty price tag or aren’t customizable enough to fit your specific needs. That is why we carefully selected the top 10 tools that can intelligently help you cover all aspects of your customer service.

1. Pandadoc

In these hard times amidst a global pandemic, going contactless is essential and that accounts for recreating all of your processes to be effective in the digital world. All of the business activities that required physical presence should be effectively recreated to support a contactless reality.

Among many such activities, document signing is one of the most notable ones and many businesses are in need of a reliable tool to help. With PandaDoc's document signing software, you can effectively organize and control your document workflow. With features to effortlessly create proposals, forms, and contracts, and eSign them in minutes, you'll be able to boost all your document-related productivity.

2. Ringblaze

Having a dedicated VoIP service is not only cost-effective for your organization, but also for your customers. Ringblaze, one of the Nextiva alternatives, is a tool with your customers in mind that offers very good features for hassle-free communication and related analytics. This app will help you create a business phone number tailored to support your audience — e.g. a Toll-free number will allow you to improve your international image and a Local number will cater to the local audience in your business’s region.

You can also create a shared Callbox to assign calls to team members and avoid having a single missed or unresolved call.

In addition, RingBlaze allows you to:

  • Record and listen to your calls
  • Quickly access and read team notes
  • Embed a call widget with a striking design to your website — This can increase your conversions and allow prospects and customers to reach out to you in no time.
  • Acquire valuable data for a rich analysis of your customer service process — This will help you assess your team’s performance, customer satisfaction and ultimately, optimize your customer service process using powerful insights.


3. Tauria

Tauria is encrypted messaging software designed to provide an elite level of security for all your sensitive data sharing and communication. It aims to provide encrypted collaboration using powerful protocols and options to enable simplicity in how you chat, share files and communicate.

These protocols encompass full end-to-end encryption and your encryption keys are kept top-secret, even from Tauira itself. As an additional feature for the years to come, Tauria offers quantum-proof encryption that should be resistant to attacks by quantum computers.

Finally, this app is compliant with regulations like GDPR, LCDP, HTPAA, and many more, which makes it up-to-date with all major security guidelines.

4. TestimonialHero

Having the capacity to showcase your expertise and customer satisfaction via authentic testimonials is crucial, as it creates social proof and helps your customers figure out if you’re a good fit for their problems.

TestimonialHero is a video testimonial service that helps you create strong social proof using the power of video testimonials. The video format is one of the most immersive and engaging formats, and combining it with stories of your most satisfied customers will give you an edge.

The TestimonialHero crew uses top-of-the-line video and audio equipment and a professional approach backed by strong expertise to record authentic and unique testimonials.

The process of using the TestminoalHero service is straightforward and hassle-free - they arrange everything, and that includes:

  • Crafting the right interview questions to get the most out of the testimonial
  • Contacting your customers and scheduling a 30-minute interview
  • Running the actual interview and recording the whole process
  • Editing the raw footage and adding special features (like B-roll) to make it more specific 
  • Completing the first video testimonial draft, which is usually heavily polished so that users can accept it straight away


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5. Messagely

Messagely is a great app for acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers with features that create a seamless experience. Using chatbots and the extensive knowledge bases this app provides, you can easily boost your communication and sales efforts.

Messagely has several useful features that can increase your conversions and boost your customer service process:

  • Live Chat — Used to enable a live chat feature on your website to drive your sales and customer satisfaction
  • Targeted messages — Messagely uses personalization-enabling technology to deliver relevant, highly-targeted messages to your customers with options to schedule and create dynamic drip campaigns
  • Shared Inbox — All-in-one inbox that offers options to tag, mention, and assign customer conversations to your team members
  • Knowledge Base — You can set up your company’s knowledge base to enable customers to resolve their problems hands-on. This results in decreasing the number of customers requests as well
  • Chatbots — Chatbots can answer questions, attend to customers and even generate leads with predefined qualifying questions
  • Live View— This feature provides essential data of your customers (like demographics, their website actions, etc) to provide a hyper-personalized experience

6. Really Simple Systems

To maximize your customer service efforts, you need a powerful and reliable CRM. There are many customer service solutions on the market and it is important to choose the one that offers high levels of versatility with an array of rich features.

Really Simple Systems is one of them and you can use it to easily track, manage and coordinate your prospects and customers. Designed as a small business CRM, this tool offers comprehensive features to support your Sales, Marketing, and Customer service departments. 

When it comes to customer service, you can use:

  • Case Management features to track and streamline customer support cases from opening to closure. 
  • Automatically prioritize customer cases using Service Level Agreements (SLAs) 
  • Capture existing and incoming emails to create a customer interaction history
  • Create rich reports that allow you to better understand your customers and optimize your marketing efforts

7. JookSMS

SMS marketing can be a great way to reach out to your audience and JooksSMS is a handy tool for boosting those efforts. It is great for small businesses, education, real estate, the medical industry, etc. 

This is a tool that leverages the benefits of SMS marketing such as higher open rates and faster read time compared to emails, and the fact that millennials prefer SMS for promos, surveys, and notifications. SMS markets are ideal for a myriad of industries, but among the top ones are certainly:

  • Healthcare — You can effectively remind your customers about upcoming visits, unlock SMS customer support and notify patients about checkups or treatment discounts.
  • Travel — Travel companies can use SMS to notify travelers about flight cancellations, confirm bookings, run various promotions, and share information regarding their journey.
  • Retail — Retailers can notify customers about new promotions, loyalty programs, and discounts
  • Gastronomy — Restaurants can enable their customers to quickly book, cancel or get information on the go.
  • Banking & Finance — Bank customers can use SMS to check for their balance, get authentication codes, etc.

8. Acquire

Acquire is one of the all-encompassing customer service software platforms that enables effective customer engagement. It offers powerful features such as:

  • Video and live chat 
  • Smart chat-bots
  • Co-browsing —  to be your visitors’ virtual host while they browse your website
  • Business Analytics — to measure the performance of your team and reveal the numbers behind conversions, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and uncover your customer activity patterns

Acquire is very versatile when it comes to integrations with other platforms, so you can easily connect it with Facebook, SalesForce, etc. All of this is backed up with a high level of customization to create reports, automate processes and define the visual appearance of the tools you use.

9. Survey Anyplace

It is important to have assessment tools that can measure your customer service performance and give you insights into your customers’ satisfaction. Survey Anyplace does just that — it helps you make interactive surveys, quizzes, and assessments you can use to effectively gauge your customer satisfaction.

Survey Anyplace offers a personalized experience to your customers that is determined by their answers and interests uncovered through surveys. That way, you can create custom reports with elements like graphs, images, or tables that dynamically change to fit your customers' preferences.

There are other useful features like White Labeling and adding scores to the answers in your surveys (Survey Scoring)

10. CallHippo

Another VoIP solution worth mentioning is CallHippo, a business phone system that sets the bar high when it comes to voice-based communication. It is an automated call center software platform with crucial features such as call monitoring & recording, call queuing, power dialer, and a productive call management system.

CallHippo will allow you to set up an IVR, automatically distribute your calls (ACD) and use smart analytics to monitor and measure your call center performance. It is easy to integrate CallHipo into your customer service process - it is efficient and frictionless.

You can create your virtual phone number, customize it by selecting only those features that are relevant to your business, and add specific extensions that each agent needs.

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Final Words

In today’s world, having reliable customer service software tailored to the current “new normal” reality is crucial. Investing in tools that aid your communication, collaboration, legal, and customer care efforts will provide your business a stable bedrock to thrive and scale-up. 

Not only can you boost the effectiveness of your customer service process, but you’ll also generate engaged and loyal customers that have a super-efficient way of communicating with your business.

About Sortd

Whatever sotware you use in your business to manage customer service, email is always going to be an integral part of your workflow. That's why we made Sortd.

Sortd is a versatile extension for Gmail that helps you efficiently track and manage your emails, tasks, and most importantly—your customers - all right inside Gmail itself. It allows for a high level of customization and has an array of useful features that help visualize and neatly organize work in a team.

With Sortd you can properly sort all your tasks and transform your Gmail into a workflow for managing orders and production, sales enquiries and even your help desk.

Sortd will transform your inbox into a collaborative Kanban board with cards to effectively display and organize all your tasks, customers, and inquiries. Designed as a customer service tool, it heavily focuses on providing options to support your customer service process and optimize your regular activities. 

For example, it enables the creation of a shared inbox that streamlines and matches your customer service process (from initial service request to resolution). It will give a lot of criteria you can use for sorting and adapting your Gmail inbox with the specific workflows you use in your business.

With Sortd you can delegate, assign, comment with @mentions and set reminders to help you simplify everyday communication and capitalize on your Gmail workflow.

About the author
Dennis Vu is the CEO and Co-founder of Ringblaze, a virtual business phone system company that helps teams to better serve their customers, anywhere.


Written by
Dennis Vu (Guest Blogger)