Best of Customer Support 2021

The Customer Support Software category for the Best Of Awards includes software products that help companies centralize, streamline, and hone their own product support. These software address Customer Success Management, Customer Experience Management, and Customer Support Teams’ needs for holistic customer profiles.

Products in this category often offer single-sources for customer profiles & communication tracking or offer more specialized software that integrate into an existing software stack. Best of Feature Set Winners in these customer support categories streamline business operations and provide tailored features that address their unique breadth of challenges. The Best Customer Service Award honors products that provide above-and-beyond resources in the form of responsive support teams and online documentation.

Winners of the Best of Usability Award offer well-integrated, customizable products that maintain high ease of use for a wide range of user levels. B2B Industry software must meet high standards in order to compete for the Best Of Awards categories. They must have 10 recent ratings from within the last year to ensure that the product’s score is accurate. They must also have an aggregate attribute rating of 8.0 or higher in the categories they compete in.

This year, the Best Of Customer Support winners are:

Best Customer Support – Customer Experience Management

• Zoho CRM Plus, 1st Place
• SoGoSurvey, 2nd Place

Best Usability – Customer Experience Management

• SoGoSurvey, 1st Place

Best Feature Set – Customer Experience Management

• Zoho CRM Plus, 1st Place
• SoGoSurvey, 2nd Place

Best Usability –  Customer Success Management

• Totango, 1st Place

Best Feature Set – Customer Success Management

• Totango, 1st Place

Best Customer Support – Help Desk

• LiveAgent, 1st Place
• Spiceworks Help Desk, 2nd Place

Best Feature Set – Help Desk

• LiveAgent, 1st Place
• Spiceworks Help Desk, 2nd Place

Best Customer Support – Live Chat

• Smith.ai Live Website Chat, 1st Place

Best Feature Set – Live Chat

• Smith.ai Live Website Chat, 1st Place

Best Feature Set – Remote Desktop

• LogMeIn Rescue, 1st Place
• TeamViewer, 2nd Place

Best Customer Experience Management Customer Support

Customer Experience Management products should help improve an organization’s interactions with customers across all or many channels. Vendors in this category should provide the same positive, personalized support experience that users of Customer Experience Management software aim to give their own customers. Vendors may approach customer experience management from different starting points. However, winners of Best Customer Support provide consistent, reliable support to help companies increase customer satisfaction, foster loyalty, and encourage customer advocacy. 

Zoho CRM Plus, 1st Place

Customer Support Score: 8.3

Zoho CRM Plus reviewers love how it fits into the wider Zoho suite of products. It has features to help reviewers centralize social media management, digital marketing, and follow-up within their CRM product. Territory management features and integrations, like Zapier and Facebook Audience, receive reviewer praise.

“The tech support is outstanding. Whenever I have a question or need help, the chat and email conversations are timely and quick to respond. the video tutorials and the online documentation are well written.”

Kris D. Director of Product Marketing | Medical Devices 11-50 employees

SoGoSurvey, 2nd Place

SoGoSurvey has been praised for their extensive online help resources, detailed webinars, and prompt live support. This, coupled with knowledgeable and cordial support staff, made SoGoSurvey receive high marks among consumers.

“I’ve been very pleased with the support I have received from SoGo. The help menu is robust and answers most of my questions. In addition to that, my account representative checks in to offer assistance. SoGo also offers webinars to share best practices related to employee surveys, polls and customer experience surveys.”

Meghan K. Employee Relations & Total Rewards Manager | Financial Services, 501-1000 employees

Best Customer Experience Management Usability

Customer Experience Management is an approach to managing and improving an organization’s interactions with its customers across all channels and touchpoints in the customer journey. The process usually involves constantly gathering customer feedback, maintaining a single profile or source of data on each customer, and delivering a personalized experience in each channel based on that data. Accomplishing this may seem like no small feat, but is in fact easily accomplished with straightforward, intuitive software. Below are the awards for Best Usability among Customer Experience Management tools.

SoGoSurvey, 1st Place

SoGoSurvey received extensive praise for its intuitive interface, allowing even people unfamiliar with the general surveying process to quickly learn and adapt to using the software. Additionally, people from a wide variety of departments equally praised its ease of use and setup.

“SoGoSurvey has worked great for the surveys, assessments, and polls that we’ve created and the time to design and further customize is minimal. The survey metrics are robust, easy to use, and can even be immediately created into a Powerpoint slide deck. We currently don’t have the CX or EX capabilities.”

Verified User IT Professional | Commercial Real Estate, 10,001+ employees

Best Customer Experience Management Feature Set

Customer Experience Management platforms should cover a broad range of capabilities. These features and functions often include a mechanism for collecting and consolidating customer data analytics as well as customer feedback and a mechanism for delivering the right content to the customer based on that data. These capabilities may be offered directly through features within the platform. Other platforms may integrate with point solutions to achieve the full range of capabilities. Best of Feature Set Winners in the CEM category offer features that help clients continuously collect customer feedback and maintain a single profile of source of data on each customer. These features should help deliver a personalized experience in each channel based on the collected data.

Zoho CRM Plus, 1st Place

Reviewers rave about the automation capabilities of Zoho CRM Plus. Automated lead follow up and alerts greatly helped reviewers improve their client relationships and stay on top of outreach. Reviewers find it easy to add contacts, manage their database, and customize Zoho dashboards to optimize their client outreach.

“Oh my word, there is no end to the automated functions that this database can manage, saving an incredible number of man-hours and providing timely alerts, follow-up sequences, and more that make everyone’s jobs easier and keeps our users well-cared for!”

Nicole L. Director of Engagement | Non-profit Organization Management, 11-50 employees

SoGoSurvey, 2nd Place

Many customers praised SoGoSurvey for its adaptability across a variety of use cases, as well as its numerous available export formats. They also scored points for their extensive templates, branching and logic abilities, and overall variety of questions available.

“[SoGoSurvey is] feature-rich, which has allowed for our desired questions and responses, even within their basic service offering.”

Verified User Vice-President | Recreational Facilities & Services Company, 51-200 employees

Best Customer Success Management Usability

Products in this category centralize all customer data into an accessible 360-degree view of the customer in order to ensure the desired outcomes while using a vendor service or product. Customer Success Management tools should be intuitive or easy for customer success managers, account managers and sales executives to navigate while still providing a wide range of features and functionality. Best of Usability winners in this category might be simple to pick up but still offer a powerful, customizable toolset. 

Totango, 1st Place

Usability Score: 8.1

Reviewers rave about how easy it is to add notes to accounts and segment notes by filters. Reviewers repeatedly describe Totango as intuitive, highly usable, and easy to pick up. It’s just as easy for users to find relevant information at a quick glance as it is to drill down into more specific, filtered content. 

“The biggest plus to Totango’s platform is that it is genuinely intuitive. My team was easily able to login for the first time when we launched and easily find information, accounts and other data points that were important to them with minimal training.”

Janet P. Customer Success Director | Computer Software, 201-500 employees

Best Customer Success Management Feature Set

To cover the breadth of data involved in successful Customer Success Management, tools need feature sets that centralize data into an accessible 360-degree view of the customer. While some CSM software focuses on one specific process, like usage-based in-product communication, other software encompasses a broader scope. Best of Feature Set winners in this category will unify customer data in one place to meet customer success managers, account managers and sales executives needs.

Totango, 1st Place

Totango reviewers love how Totango offers extensive functionality, like customer retention campaigns, CSM workflow management, monitoring, and alerts. Reviewers love the ability to backdate entries or correspondence and create clear follow-up tasks. Totango’s email integration also receives top marks from CSM professionals!

“Their Product team does a great job of keeping users informed of what is on the roadmap and takes time to listen. It took us a few months to really wrap our arms around all the data and features available in Totango, but once we did, it was clear to see the difference it has made on the team.”

Elizabeth T. Team Lead, Customer Success | Internet 201-500 employees

Best Help Desk Customer Support

Business users expect their Help Desk software to assist them in providing seamless, timely support to their clients. It only makes sense that these software products would offer the same high level of customer support! Winners in this category provide timely support and extensive self-help documentation. Whether it’s via chat, over the phone, or through community resources, Best of Customer Support for the Help Desk category provides a plethora of resources to help users help their customers.

LiveAgent, 1st Place

Customer Support Score: 9.3

LiveAgent provides reviewers with prompt, timely support via phone and online chat. Reviewers also appreciate the extensive online documentation and community resources available. 

“LiveAgent has an incredible customer support team. The team is attentive and does an excellent job explaining solutions. They also have an extensive database that is easy to navigate and includes videos, blog posts, and FAQs.”

Alissa B. Director of Operations | Leisure, Travel & Tourism, 11-50 employees

Spiceworks Help Desk, 2nd Place

Customer Support Score: 8.6

Reviewers appreciate the quick turnaround time for support queries. Reviewers rave about Spiceworks’ online community forums and extensive documentation. Community members have answers to nearly all questions or issues reviewers have experienced, making it an affordable (i.e. free!) and well supported product.

“Within 10 min. of my email to them for support issues, I receive a response, and they’ve always been very helpful and friendly.”

Dan S. Community Support Supervisor | Government Administration, 501-1000 employees 

Best Help Desk Feature Set

Customer service software, service desk software, customer support software: Help Desk Software can go by many names! These products provide a single point of contact for users to connect with a company, and provide features to manage support tickets, live chat support, knowledge bases, and social support. Vendors may offer different degrees of customization or advanced capabilities, but all winners in this category should have a range of features to address business’ increasingly complex support offerings. 

LiveAgent, 1st Place

Reviewers love LiveAgent’s “pre-built” knowledge base feature, allowing them to create customized and branded self-help support documentation without starting from scratch. LiveAgent tagging and case transfer capabilities also receive high marks from reviewers.

“As there are only two people managing customer support, this is a great help desk solution, as it provides everything we need in one platform. We use it to manage live chat, tickets, social media channels and to receive and make outbound calls. LiveAgent’s functionality and automation options make the daily work so much easier and faster.”

Alexandra F. Key Account Manager | Health, Wellness and Fitness, 1-10 employees

Spiceworks Help Desk, 2nd Place

Reviewers especially enjoy the reporting capabilities of Spiceworks Help Desk. Reviewers are able to track a wide variety of metrics and provide their users with a solid help desk ticketing service without spending a fortune.

“Spiceworks is great for places with small tech budgets. Its free version is great to use, especially as a ticket system to keep things efficient in the office. The inventory section can be super useful in smaller networks.”

Barrett F. Client Support Specialist | Higher Education, 5001-10,000 employees

Best Live Chat Customer Support

Live Chat Software helps business professionals connect with their website visitors in real-time. Since most users leverage these products for sales and/or customer support on their websites, solid customer support from vendors is essential to maintaining a positive end-user, customer experience. Winners of Best Customer Support in this category helps ensure their products are properly implemented and optimized on users’ websites and provide ongoing, timely assistance.

Smith.ai Live Website Chat, 1st Place

Customer Support Score: 9.1

Reviewers like that Smith.ai Live Website Chat takes corrective action quickly and accurately. Smith.ai’s support team is prompt responding to help tickets and helped reviewers properly implement their chatbots. Reviewers rave about their thoughtful and thorough support representatives!

“All the representatives at Smith.ai have been responsive to customer service questions and implementation of the product. They quickly respond to inquiries and have always responded positively to reasonable requests. They show a high level of customer appreciation compared to some other companies.”

Shawn H. Attorney | Law Practice, 1-10 employees

Best Live Chat Feature Set

Best of Feature Sets for this category need to cover a wide variety of help desk, chat, and ticket form customizations and capabilities. It’s important that Live Chat software offer direct avenues for visitors to connect with company support or sales teams. Important features for this category include real-time messaging, canned responses and greetings, notifications, chat history and transcripts, ticket forms, encrypted messages, customization, SSO, and more. Winners provide  a broad range of capabilities that users can customize to meet their unique business needs.

Smith.ai Live Website Chat, 1st Place

Smith.ai Live Website Chat receives top marks from reviewers for chat and phone monitoring systems. Reviewers appreciate that they can have automated channels for collecting new lead contact information, referral sources, and case details. Other reviewers love that they can integrate FAQs, disclaimers, and automated Q&A answers seamlessly on their websites.

“Perfect for 24/7 chat agent to monitor the website so you don’t miss any clients. Also if you need an after hours receptionist to take calls, texts, chats and Facebook messages, it’s great and super well priced.”

Verified User C-Level Executive | Legal, 1-10 employees

Best Remote Desktop Feature Set

Products in this category need to, at a minimum, allow users to carry out remote desktop functions like screen capture and viewing, file and registry management, instant message, and access to sleeping/powered off computers. While many business users turn to Remote Desktop software for IT maintenance and support, products in this category may also be used by professionals across disciplines for educational instruction, product demos, and web conferencing. The Best Feature Set Winners for Remote Desktop software need to offer all types of users solid standard remote desktop features and advanced capabilities to meet diverse business needs. 

LogMeIn Rescue, 1st Place

Reviewers love that LogMeIn Rescue allows them to access unattended workstations, install software across devices, and provide robust technical support to clients of all skill levels from the safety of their homes! Users can gather statistics on a remote computer such as services installed and running, disk space, and other metrics. Reviewers also appreciate that LogMeIn Rescue makes it easy for users of all skill levels to connect. 

“We had to hastily deploy employees to work from home in the face of the COVID crisis. LogMeIn allowed for remote support to be possible by allowing authentication outside of the VPN or local domain connection – no other remote support solution offered that flexibility.”

Verified User IT Technician | Telecommunications Company, 10,001+ employees

TeamViewer, 2nd Place

Reviewers give TeamViewer top marks for securely remoting into machines deployed across a workspace or remote company. TeamViewer offers helpful permission and security levels to help users maintain access control. Many reviewers also appreciate that they’re able to access machines on their PC and mobile devices. 

“If you need to quickly do a remote session with a client and see what they are seeing on their end for troubleshooting or need to do a Remote Desktop connection without being on the same network then it’s fantastic. It’s also good for transferring files and copy-paste is also supported across your computer and the remote one.”

Verified User Engineer | Industrial Automation Company, 11-50 employees