You Can Trust Our Reviews
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
Buying Guide: The Best Customer Service Software for 2026
What Is Customer Service Software?
Customer service software makes incident management much easier by organizing all incoming questions and requests into actionable tickets, no matter whether a customer contacts you via chat, email, an online portal, phone, or social media. This software also creates efficiencies at every step in the process, from centralizing knowledge resources to providing standardized resolutions to routing problems to the most appropriate agent.
How Does Customer Service Software Differ From IT Help Desk Software?
Customer service software helps your support team resolve issues for external customers, whereas IT help desk software helps your support team service internal employees. They largely work the same in practice, though the sources of ticket intake might differ. Both types offer similar core ticket management features and tools for building knowledge bases, though IT help desk software is more likely to include asset, change, and project management capabilities.
What Customer Service Software Features Are Essential?
At the very least, make sure your customer service software of choice can:
- Intake tickets via multiple channels, such as chat, email, phone, an online portal, or social media
- Create, route, and track tickets
- Modify and close tickets while maintaining a record of interactions
You should also make sure the service you pick has tools for building a knowledge base. Articles within a knowledge base should provide clear answers and resolutions to common questions and issues. Your support team can reference these materials to provide quick, consistent resolutions; your customers can use them to resolve issues independently; and AI tools can access them to craft automated responses.
Integrations are also key. You need a service that works seamlessly with your team's existing software and workflows. Some services, for example, can connect to Teams and Slack, letting you create and update tickets from where you already communicate. Prebuilt integrations are ideal, but your company's developers might be able to build custom connections.
How Should You Manage Tickets?
At a minimum, tickets include a summary of the incident and the customer's contact details. But you can also add any other relevant information, including via custom fields. Customer service software keeps a record of everything that happens, from user communications to ticket escalations to reassignments.
Because ticket inflow is likely to be steady, you need to make sure you don't overwhelm any one member of your support staff, even if they have the most relevant knowledge about the issue at hand. Setting up automatic routing rules based on your agents' availability or skills is wise, and reports provide insights into which topics require more dedicated human resources or targeted knowledge base articles. You should also make every effort to prioritize problems that affect important clients or a large number of customers.
Does Customer Service Software Use AI and Chatbots?
The majority of customer service solutions help you set up advanced AI chatbots that can respond to customers directly and support your staff by providing relevant information based on knowledge base articles. But if a bot can't solve a problem directly, it should be able to send customers to the appropriate support staff member or group.
As with other types of business software, AI can assist with basic editing, idea generation, summarization, and writing tasks, such as creating knowledge base articles or updating a ticket. Some services use AI to enable other conveniences, such as changing admin settings and generating reports via natural-language prompts.