Some companies have a ticketing system for customer service. Some have live chats, and some rely heavily on emails.

If your customer service is email-based, you’ll need customer service software that will let you manage your emails effectively.

Here’s a list of some of the best customer service software for managing emails that we’ve tested for performance, user-friendliness, and functionality.

Let’s dig in.

HelpScout – Best for Shared Inbox Management

Shared inboxes can be a hassle to manage. It’s hard keeping everyone on the same page, especially when they are multiple people working on multiple tickets. Not to mention, performance tracking is another nightmare. You wouldn’t know how many tickets or problems one salesperson resolved.

HelpScout solves this problem by letting you keep track of all your support requests in a shared inbox. You can use the tool to:

• Organize Communication: Whether with teams or with customers, you can organize communication by automating workflows. You can send teammates private notes, create a library of saved replies for instant response, tag customer conversations and make sure your entire team can view and respond to customer tickets – allowing everyone to be on the same page.
• Integration with Applications: You don’t always have to have the HelpScout dashboard kept open. With easy integration to platforms like Slack, Jira, HubSpot, and a dozen other applications, your teams will get real-time notification of any new customer service request.
• Improved Efficiency with Automation: Modern tools are not effective if they don’t allow for automation. HelpScout lets you save replies to common questions. Eventually, you can use those common questions and replies to form your knowledge base.

Pros and Cons:

Pricing:

It starts at $10.00 per month, per user. There is a free trial—no free version.

Zendesk – Best for Customer Support with Email Management

Zendesk needs no introduction. It’s one of the most widely used customer service software for managing emails, used by brands like Uber, Venmo, Shopify, and 150,000+ businesses. Companies that use emails to manage customer service find Zendesk the perfect tool to streamline the support process.

With Zendesk, you can:

• Connect All of Your Data Sources: Whenever a customer contacts you for support, your team gets a complete overview of your customer’s information allowing you to resolve queries while staying informed.
• Set of Tools for Support Team: Timely communication & collaboration between agents is the key to effective customer service. Custom views, built-in SLAs, and native mobile apps allow agents to respond to customer requests in real-time.
• Flexible & Customizable Solution: Every business may differ when it comes to making the best use of customer service software, which is why Zendesk may be the most helpful choice. You can get customizable solutions that work specifically for your business model.

Pros and Cons: 

Pricing:

The basic plan starts at $5/month/agent; however, your plan may start from $89/agent/month if you’re a mid to large enterprise. It’s best to speak to them to discover which plan may suit your business purpose best.

Drag – Best for Gmail-Based Customer Support Service

Most customer service starts from email, specifically from Gmail. If you’ve got a large chunk of your support tickets coming from Gmail, you’ll find Drag a good solution.

Drag works like most other customer service software for managing emails, where you can manage shared emails like support@, manage help desk tickets in Gmail, collaborate with teammates, and automate tasks.

Drag is it’s solely designed for Gmail, allowing you to: 

• Integrate a Support Dashboard Within Your Gmail: Drag turns your Gmail dashboard into your team’s workspace, meaning you get to manage your support without leaving Gmail.
• Shared Project Management Boards: Let everyone on your team stay on the same page with shared project management boards. Your teams can collaborate, communicate and prioritize support tasks without using multiple tools or help desk systems.
• Google Calendar Integration: Make it easier to keep track of calls and meetings with a Google Calendar Integration.

Pros and Cons:

Pricing:

There’s a Forever Free version that allows one inbox with 10 boards. The paid version starts with $8/user/month with unlimited shared inboxes and boards. 

timetoreply – Best for Performance Metrics

Most customer service software is limiting in terms of performance reporting. You can’t see which of your agents are responding on time. You can’t calculate the average email response time to customer queries. Most importantly, you can’t evaluate the performance of your customer service team. 

timetoreply is customer service software that helps your customer service/success team improve their responsiveness over email. With timetoreply you can: 

• Measure and Improve Average Response Time: Your average response time is a measure of how long it takes your team to respond to leads or customers. Most customer service software does not have average time response metrics, which is extremely important for evaluating support and sales performance. 
• Manage Support and Sales Teams: This is the only tool that allows you to manage both departments under one platform with the teams’ tool. You’ll never miss a lead or a customer email again. 
• Manage Shared and Individual Inboxes: timetoreply works for Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, MS Exchange, and IMAP. You can also easily manage shared inboxes while keeping track of your agent’s performance and each agent’s average response time in relation to the shared inbox. This enables you to see who is doing the lion’s share of the work.
• Get Real-Time Alerts: timetoreply is the only email analytics tool on the market that enables you and your team to get real-time alerts when a priority email has been waiting for a response for too long.
• See the average time to close and close conversations from the inbox itself: timetoreply’s close conversation app extension turns your team’s inbox into a ticketing system, allowing them to mark conversations as closed once resolved. As am

Pros and Cons

Pricing

Plans start at $15 per mailbox per month with a 15 day free trial. 

Freshdesk – Best for Managing Support Tasks through a Ticketing System 

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that turns omnichannel requests (phone, chat, mail, web, into easily-manageable tickets. Unlike other platforms, Freshdesk uses a ticket management system to streamline and automate support tasks. 

With Freshdesk, you can: 

Prioritize Tickets: With the ticketing system, you can prioritize tickets based on keywords and assign them to specific agents and groups. This allows for better team collaboration and agent productivity. 

Create Canned Responses: It makes it easy for your agents to respond to general queries with canned responses. All they need to do is save replies on tickets and reuse them. 

Handle Tickets Smartly: Want to merge multiple tickets into one? Want to check which tickets to see first? The tool allows you to share ownership of tickets, split tickets into sub-tickets, and much more. 

Pricing: 

Free-for-life option with basic features. Paid plan starts at $15/agent/month. 

To Conclude

Your choice of email-based customer service software depends on your business requirements, budget, and end goals. For new businesses, it’s always recommended to go with a less costly solution. Mid or enterprise-level businesses should opt for powerful platforms like timetoreply.