EMAIL MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

An Introduction to Email Management Software

If your email feels out of control, don’t worry. It’s never too late to adopt a specialized email management tool to help you control the chaos.

catherine heath

January 16, 2023

7 mins read

One of the most popular ways for customers to contact customer service teams is through email. It’s fast, convenient, and allows customers to move on with their day while waiting for a reply. 54% of customers use a customer support email for customer service, making it the number one communication channel for customer service. 

However, it’s not all a bed of roses. What happens when customer service teams are inundated with emails so that their inbox becomes a mess? How do multiple customer service team members collaborate on customer email when they’re all monitoring the same shared inbox? 

The answer is email management software. Customer service teams have huge potential to benefit from this type of tool because they are already spending all day, every day inside their email inbox. 

A personal inbox can only take you so far in the customer service journey, while the best email management software offers advanced features that have been specifically developed for customer service teams. 

Support emails slipping through the cracks?
Keeping is the best helpdesk for Gmail that turns emails into support tickets that you can track, assign, and prioritize.

What is email management software?

Email management software is any tool that helps you receive, manage, send and organize emails. While email management software can be a somewhat broad term, we are focusing on email management in the niche of shared inboxes and customer support tools. We’re excluding the types of email management tools that allow marketers to send email marketing campaigns, for example. 

With email management software solutions, you can manage high volumes of emails, keep track of their progress, and split the work among multiple team members. Their purpose is for customer support teams to communicate with their customers and treat each email as a customer support ticket. 

Most email management solutions sit on top of your regular email inbox and provide extra features for managing your emails. 

What are the benefits of email management software?

Instead of drowning in customer emails, email management software helps team members keep on top of their incoming mail and effectively reply to their customers. Typically, email management software supports multiple user email accounts so support agents can collaborate on customer email management. 

Without this kind of email management software, organizations will not be able to handle large numbers of customers. Emails get missed or duplicate replies are sent, both of which are an embarrassment to the customer service department. 

Normal email inboxes have been designed for the use of individuals, having one-on-one interactions with their correspondents. Email management software can facilitate many contributors collaborating on a response to a customer email, and present a more professional experience for the customer. Average email response time is improved as agents know exactly how to deal with every email. 

There are some universal email management software features you should look out for. You can assign an email to a particular agent, and lock the email to prevent more than one person drafting a response. Emails can be tracked as Open, Pending or Closed, so you never miss another enquiry. Saved responses mean your team can quickly insert templates into common emails. 

To summarize, email management software can drastically reduce the amount of time spent sorting through email, freeing your team up for more productive tasks. 

Top 7 email management software

We’ve got the best email management software for customer service teams right here. 

1. Keeping

If you’re in the market for email management software, look no further than Keeping. Keeping is aimed directly at customer service teams working within Gmail to manage customer enquiries. Because Keeping integrates with Gmail, teams are spared the necessity of learning a new tool since Keeping works quietly in the background. You’ll simply notice a few extra features are available in Gmail after installing Keeping. 

Keeping helps customer support teams take their email customer service to the next level. Incoming emails can be automatically assigned to teams or team members, saving valuable time on ticket routing. Each ticket is assigned a status of Open, Pending, or Closed, so teams are always kept informed about the progress of a ticket. 

Private notes enable customer service teams to collaborate more effectively on support tickets, while collision detection means you never send a duplicate response again. Canned replies save you time as you can insert them into an email with just a few clicks. 

Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of using email management software like Keeping is the ability to track the performance of your team and individual agents. Keeping provides access to vital customer service metrics like First Response Time and Volume of Requests. Get help with planning your staffing as you can see clearly whether your customer service department is meeting its SLAs

Keeping is simple but powerful, and supports customer service teams to make the most of their emails. 

2. Front 

Front is a customer communications platform for managing your team’s email and building personal relationships. The interface of Front is very much like an email inbox so it won’t be too hard for your team to learn this new tool. Teams can collaborate on replies to customers using shared drafts, making it easier than ever to provide solutions that customers actually want and making it one of the best email management tools. 

The advantage of Front is it brings together multiple communication channels for your support team such as live chat and social media, so your company can provide an integrated experience for customers. Front markets itself as an alternative to a ticketing system, because it treats customers like conversations rather than tickets. 

Every team member has access to customer data and conversation history so that each customer has a personalized experience. Automated workflows use a rule-based system to remove the need for manual tasks. Analytics provide insight into your team’s performance. 

3. Emailigistics

Emailigistics is email management software built to work on Outlook in order to give your inbox more advanced features. For customer service teams who prefer to work in Outlook, Emailigistics provides a robust alternative to switching to another solution, making it one of the most popular email management apps. 

Many features aren’t available in the standard Outlook interface, such as the ability to assign emails to particular team members or close completed messages. Every email comes with a conversation audit trail so you can keep track of the history of how your service reps have responded to customers. 

Critically, reports and dashboards give you essential productivity insights which enables you to improve your team’s performance over time. Intelligent workflow rules allow you to instantly route any email to a particular team member or department, speeding up time to resolution. Conversation tools make it easy for teams to comment on emails, without the need for an external chat tool which requires context-switching. 

4. Gmail

Some teams prefer to rely on Gmail itself for their email management software. The advantage of Gmail is it’s familiar, and it’s a free email service provided by Google, making it the best free email management software. Professional teams like Gmail because it’s part of Google Workspace, which also offers a host of other productivity tools that might be used by customer service teams, such as Calendar, Drive, Docs, Meet and more. 

Trusted by over a billion people, Gmail falls a bit short on email management because it was specifically designed for individual users. Teams must rely on Google Groups Collaborative Inbox or Gmail Shared Inbox to collaborate on customer service emails. These types of tools were designed for groups and not necessarily customer service teams, and lack important features for teams who want to track, manage and assign emails. 

Of course, ultimately it’s down to personal preference whether customer service teams want to keep using Gmail to manage their email. After a while, most make the switch to more specialized software – even if it does cost a bit more. 

5. LiveAgent

LiveAgent is simple customer support software for teams that helps you manage your incoming emails. LiveAgent boasts more than 200 integrations including Pipedrive, Mailchimp and Shopify. 

The big advantage of LiveAgent is you can manage all your incoming support requests in one place, regardless of the channel through which they are submitted, which is why it’s one of the best email management software. They’ve particularly invested in their live chat widget which helps you connect with customers in real-time. Customers automatically connect to your CRM so agents are always aware of customer data, and automatic chat routing means customers are never kept waiting. 

All customer messages are presented in a timeline view, regardless of channel. So if a customer hops from email to phone call, vital customer context is never lost. Using LiveAgent means you don’t have to adopt multiple expensive tools to keep track of customers. 

6. Helpwise

Helpwise is shared inbox, live chat and help center software. It’s shared inbox capabilities mean you can access multiple accounts, including all your email inboxes, from a single screen. To make things easier on your users, Helpwise looks mostly like a traditional email inbox, while including many powerful features to make email management easier. 

Like LiveAgent, Helpwise brings all your channels together for a better customer experience. Collaboration is frictionless with features such as tagging team members, private notes for colleagues, single-click assignment and seamless integration with popular apps. 

Helpwise is a good choice of email management software for organizations that want to go beyond customer email, and provide an integrated support experience. It also offers marketing capabilities such as using tools like live chat and chatbots to sell more products to your website visitors. You can capture customer feedback using forms and CSAT surveys, which help you improve the service experience. 

7. Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail is email management software for businesses who care about security and protection against fake emails. Considering the amount of time the average knowledge worker spends inside their inbox, Zoho Mail provides a clean and uncluttered interface that makes managing customer emails a breeze. 

To start using Zoho Mail, you simply create a custom domain for your business and set up custom email addresses for your users. Zoho Mail functions much more as a traditional email inbox than some of the other tools on this list, which is great for users that require simplicity from their email management tool. 

One of the best features of Zoho Mail is its integration with the other Zoho products such as Zoho CRM to automatically sync your data. Zoho Mail also provides you with an integrated calendar, contact list, tasks, notes, and bookmarks directly within your inbox, so you can get more accomplished without leaving your email.

Wrapping up

Email is such a popular channel for customer service that companies cannot afford to miss out on email management software. Software that has been specially designed for email management drastically improves the customer experience and raises satisfaction across the board. Agents enjoy working with the best email management tools and find it easier to provide solutions for customers. 

If your email feels out of control, don’t worry. It’s never too late to adopt a specialized email management tool to help you control the chaos. Both your customers and agents will thank you. 

Email management software like Keeping is essential for businesses that value customer service. After all, satisfied and loyal customers are directly correlated with increased revenue, which means your business can continue to thrive in the years to come. Keeping is the best email management tool because it is simple, powerful, reasonably priced and offers great support. 

Busy customer service teams must adopt email management software to help them deal with high volumes of customers. 

Support emails slipping through the cracks?
Keeping is the best helpdesk for Gmail that turns emails into support tickets that you can track, assign, and prioritize.
catherine heath

Catherine is a content writer and community builder for creative and ethical companies. She often writes case studies, help documentation and articles about customer support. Her writing has helped businesses to attract curious audiences and transform them into loyal advocates. You can find more of her work at https://awaywithwords.co.

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