9 Best Customer Service Email Management Software and Tools

Email is a very traditional method of communication between businesses and their customers. When a customer has a problem, what do they do? Fire off an email after finding contact details on a company’s website. If you don’t have a very rapid and helpful response ready for your customers, you negatively impact customer satisfaction. 

What is customer service email management software? 

In order to meet this need, many customer service email management software solutions have been developed by companies seeking to help businesses support their customers. A very high volume of email means you must manage your customer inquiries with dedicated software, giving you the ability to receive, organize, prioritize and assign emails within a team. 

A customer service email management system is more than just email – it’s a centralized hub for everything related to your email messages. You can establish workflows and automate processes easily with your email management software and begin working seamlessly as a team. 

Customer service email management software enhances productivity and brings you closer to your customers by offering features that make email easier. You gain visibility into your email volume, response times and more, enabling you to make changes that make your processes more effective. This is important, since 90% of customers trust a company whose service they rate as “very good”. 

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Customer service email management software may also integrate other channels such as social, SMS and voice to bring your customer service together. 

What are the advantages of customer service email management software?

As we’ve just hinted at, managing your customer service emails with software is the best way to elevate your processes. When customer support agents have the right tools, they are better equipped to serve customers. If customers need to email you, they shouldn’t have to wait around for an answer or suffer through ineffective responses. 

Email management for customer service takes the effort of a whole support team to get right. By using software such as Keeping, businesses can upgrade from a regular inbox to a shared inbox tool offering all the features for email management. Collaborative features, communication and analysis are key to effective customer service email. 

No matter how many emails you receive from customers needing your help, customer service email management software will help you control both incoming and outgoing emails. By tracking customer conversations, providing contextual data about customers, and assigning particular agents to emails, your email management becomes much more effective. 

While small customer service teams may be able to make do with traditional email, in order to save time and grow you will need to adopt more advanced software. 

How to choose email software for customer service? 

The range of customer service email management software available means you have to be very sure about what you’re looking for. 

• Integrations with existing email platforms – if you’re already using a platform such as Gmail, an email management software that integrates with Gmail would be ideal to enable you to stay within the familiar interface and ecosystem. 
• Allows you to own your data in case you leave – platforms such as Keeping never own your data so even if you decide to leave, you take all your emails with you so there is no lapse in service. 
• Enables you to scale effectively with more seats – when you adopt the right customer service email management software, your team is likely to scale in the future as your operations become more effective. 
• Only offers the features you need – you don’t want to pay more than is necessary for features that seem shiny but actually offer no value for your particular business case. 

The array of individual features will be up to you and your needs. You might want a solution that is cloud based, offers kanban boards, supports multiple channels such as voice, or implements AI for more powerful workflows. 

The best customer service email management software

Now, we’re going to take a good look at some of the best options for customer service email management software available for your business right now. 

1. Keeping

We’re going to kick off this list with our very own Keeping, which is customer service email management software built directly for Gmail. The beauty of Keeping is that it works seamlessly within Gmail so you retain all your email inbox features combined with team collaboration, communication, organization and automation. 

With Keeping, you can serve your customers through email much better. Every email that comes in is turned into a ticket, and you can assign it to your preferred agent or route it to a particular department. Every email has a status and a priority that helps you organize all your tickets, even when the volume is high. 

Multiple mailboxes are no problem for Keeping, supporting even the busiest customer service departments. Analytics tell you how your mailboxes are doing, as well as individual agents and tags so you can take action based on insights. 

Keeping has several notable features that help you with email management: 

• Collision detection – stop more than one agent replying to a particular email at the same time and prevent duplicate replies in real time. 
• Saved replies – saved replies or shared templates can be inserted into emails that require common answers to repetitive questions. 
• Internal notes – agents can chat to each other within Keeping to avoid having to switch to an external communication tool. 
• Tagging agents – grab a particular agent’s attention within an email and get them to take action with tags. 
• Automate workflows – automatically assign, prioritize or tag tickets to improve team efficiency. 

Customer service just works better with Keeping’s email management software, especially for small businesses looking for a budget-friendly solution. 

2. Freshworks

Freshdesk by Freshworks is an alternative customer service email management software that allows you to handle high volumes of email and other communication types. Personalize your support no matter the size of your customer service team with a unified workspace that means no customer ever gets missed. 

Freshdesk gives you the power of automations with a self-service knowledge base and widgets that direct customers towards answers. AI-powered automations bring your email management software into the modern era with assistance for agents in providing accurate responses. 

Highly granular insights driven by AI enables your admins to analyze the quality of customer interactions and identify improvements. No-code bots even enable you to help customers automatically by suggesting answers to common problems. Deflecting more tickets with self-service and bots gives your agents more time to manage the email inbox. 

3. Superhuman

Superhuman is email software for teams who want to benefit from the power of AI when helping customers. Superhuman adds extra features to Gmail or Outlook for teams that need to collaborate and process email much faster than average. By implementing AI that analyzes your emails and composes new ones based on your previous tone and a few phrases, you can quickly reply to customers naturally. 

Superhuman splits your inbox so you can focus on the emails that matter most and prioritize the most important. It offers automatic reminders so you can follow up on an email if someone doesn’t reply, relieving your agents of some of the burden of remembering every conversation.

Snoozing emails is easy when you don’t want to deal with a message right away, and Superhuman will also remind you to go back to it. Insight into the read status of your emails enables you to send more tailored messages to your customers and increase the chances you can get them to reply. 

4. HelpSpot

HelpSpot is for scaling customer service in email ticketing and can support multiple mailboxes. It’s possible to deeply analyze your help desk with HelpSpot’s reporting and integrate with their self-service knowledge base to help more customers. It’s organized in the form of a book to improve user experience. 

The great thing about HelpSpot is you can install it on your premises or allow HelpSpot to host it for you. There’s no limit to the number of customers you can support, which doesn’t make a difference to the cost of HelpSpot. 

Email management is the name of the game with HelpSpot and you can enable customers to submit tickets to the portal for the attention of your agents. Create your own tickets as and when needed, and use the API to connect HelpSpot with other channels that you use to support your customers. 

5. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is HubSpot’s answer to customer service, allowing you to start with a free plan for newly-established customer service teams. HubSpot focuses on customer relationships and offers integrations with its suite of software for a holistic support experience. 

HubSpot Service Hub gives you insights into customers and allows you to track their interactions, facilitating a personalized experience no matter who is dealing with the customer. 

The customer portal enables customers to submit their tickets and keep them organized. Integrations with the knowledge base offers customers self-service support, while Service Hub also supports inbound calls for customers who prefer the phone. 

6. HelpScout

Help Scout is an email management software that brings together the best of omnichannel while prioritizing support email. An intuitive user experience enables businesses to learn Help Scout very quickly and operate smoothly as a team. Help Scout remains invisible to your customers as simply a shared email inbox with collaborative and AI features. 

Help Scout provides customer data that enables you to build genuine relationships with your customers, as well as a help center that gives customers self-service support when your agents are unavailable or able to deflect tickets with content. Access to live chat means customers can also get instant answers from your agents. 

Take advantage of apps and integrations with tools such as HubSpot and Jira to make your workflows much easier. Help Scout integrations are numerous and they work right out-of-the-box, and you can also set up automations with Zapier. 

7. HappyFox

HappyFox is another customer service email management software that allows you to optimize your workflows with customers. You can communicate with your customers through omnichannel, including live chat, social media, and voice, as well as email. HappyFox’s ticketing system is full-featured and enables you to manage tickets with great detail. 

You’ll have all the usual features you might expect such as canned responses, ticket actions such as cloning and merging, and private notes for collaboration. This means you can deal with a high volume of potentially overlapping tickets that might all revolve around similar topics.

Creating tasks is easy with HappyFox which enables you to break down tickets into actionable items. Make helpful knowledge bases that support customers with common questions, and even deliver it in multiple languages to cater for your global customers. 

8. Front

Front is a simple and streamlined customer operations platform that offers omnichannel support including live chat. Route tickets to the right person no matter the channel and personalize your interactions with customer history and data. You can measure customer happiness and team performance through surveys and access to reports. 

Cross-functional teams can easily collaborate with HappyFox. Managers can see who is responding to tickets and how well they are doing with increased visibility. AI can give you a summary of the conversation to avoid having to read through long threads. 

Communicate with your customers through live chat which you can add to your website, mobile app or product for easy access for your customers. Front offers chatbots that allow you to automate conversations with customers and pass any necessary context onto a team member. 

9. LiveAgent

Beginning its life as a platform for live chat, LiveAgent now supports multiple ticketing channels for your customers. Integrate LiveAgent with many of your favorite apps such as Whatsapp and WordPress for a better experience. Link up with social media channels to increase the chances of communicating with your customers. 

The ticketing system organizes your customer conversations and enables your agents to work together. You can recall your phone calls in LiveAgent and manage your agent availability within the system for better efficiency. 

Automate mundane and repetitive tasks with intelligent Rules to cover basic help desk functions that siphon away your time. LiveAgent supports 43 languages that enable you to communicate with multilingual customers, regardless of proficiency. 

Wrapping up

Tackling support requests is much easier with customer service email management software like Keeping or one of our alternatives. Packed with features that help you collaborate, automate, report and interact, email management software is the right call if you want to improve customer satisfaction and increase loyalty. 

Traditional email solutions like Gmail or Outlook are great for personal emails or even small teams, but you’ll soon find you need to upgrade to a better software. To have the best of both worlds, choose Keeping which integrates fully with Gmail to keep your familiar interface at your fingertips. 

Consider which channels and features are most appropriate for you when selecting a solution. 

Customers appreciate it when you respond to them with the right software and are on the receiving end of full collaboration from your team. Customer service teams are more efficient and helpful when they can assign, prioritize and route tickets so that no one slips through the cracks.