9 Best Customer Service Email Management Tools in 2024

Customer service is the lifeblood of your company.

By responding quickly and efficiently, you keep customers happy. You boost their trust. They stay longer.

But it’s no longer enough to rely on basic email tools. Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and we need to step up to meet them.

The right customer service email management tool can help you process inquiries at scale while keeping responses personalized.

I’ve spent time testing out all customer support email tools I could get my hands on, and these are my picks for the nine best.

Best customer service email management tools at a glance

• Keeping for growing teams who want to collaborate right within Gmail
• Freshworks for established businesses requiring advanced CRM capabilities
• Superhuman for high-volume email users in large corporations
• HelpSpot for enterprise teams requiring extensive customization
• HubSpot Service Hub for large marketing-focused organizations
• Help Scout for small static teams with straightforward needs
• HappyFox for large IT and HR departments
• Front for enterprises with intricate communication needs
• LiveAgent for established e-commerce businesses

What is customer service email management software?

Customer service email management software helps solopreneurs and businesses organize, prioritize, and respond to emails from their customers in a more efficient manner. It’s a type of software tool that allows support teams to collaborate and respond to customer inquiries at scale.

Consider a customer service email management system like a centralized hub for your company’s email (and everything related).

Typical features include:

• ✅ Shared inboxes: for easy collaboration between team members
• ✅ Ticket tracking: to systematically respond to customer inquiries
• ✅ Automation: to streamline support processes
• ✅ Analytics: to track efficiency and other metrics and improve decision-making

Some customer service email management software may also integrate with social, SMS and voice to unify all channels where customers contact your business.

Businesses use these software tools to provide higher quality, more efficient customer support. They can help to improve response times and boost customer satisfaction.

The Importance of Customer Service Management

Stepping up your game support-wise can help your business grow and retain customers. 

90% of customers say they trust a company with exceptional support.

By using a customer service email management tool, you can increase efficiency by:

• Creating smooth SOPs
• Categorizing by tags
• Sharing templates and pre-crafted responses
• Establishing workflows
• Automating processes
• Adding additional notes and information to specific tickets
• Gaining visibility into email volume, response times, and customer feedback

The typical result? More efficiency, improved support, and happier customers who keep coming back.

Who can benefit from customer service email management software?

There are a number of different use cases for email management software, including:

• Customer service teams struggling with email collaboration, missing emails, or duplicate responses
• Growing businesses that want to scale efficiently
• Teams wanting to provide better support without resorting to complex, enterprise-level helpdesks
• Customer service teams looking to automate repetitive tasks and improve process efficiency
• Managers seeking data-driven insights to improve email support team performance
• Businesses with multiple support email addresses or departments

Whether you’re looking for an enterprise-ready solution or want to keep things as simple as possible, there’s an option for you. 

I created this guide with the intention of helping you simplify your decision-making process and understand the key differences between various solutions.

9 best customer service email management tools today

#1. Keeping

You’ve outgrown basic email management but aren’t yet at the point where you need a dedicated, enterprise-level help desk system.

This is the most common feedback we hear from founders.

And considering that only 36% of consumers feel like a unique individual when engaging with customer service, businesses are struggling more than ever to make customer support feel personal.

That’s why we created Keeping, a customer service email management software built directly on top of Gmail. It’s like an email ticketing system right within Workspace.

The beauty of Keeping is in its simplicity. It works seamlessly within Gmail or Workspace, so you retain everything in your original inbox.

But it stacks on capabilities that allow your team to collaborate, communicate, organize, and respond better – then analyze and measure improvements. It essentially takes your Gmail and upgrades it into a help desk with ticketing functionality.

Keeping has several notable features that help your team streamline email management:

• ✅ Collision detection: to prevent duplicate replies or more than one agent replying to an email simultaneously
• ✅ Saved replies: to save responses, share templates, and create a database of FAQ responses
• ✅ Internal notes: to add chat functionality for agents to communicate in Gmail without having to leave the platform
• ✅ Tagging: to assign tickets to particular agents and organize emails
• ✅ Automate workflows: to automatically assign, prioritize or tag incoming tickets for improved efficiency

Though it’s used to support even the busiest of customer service departments, it still remains one of the more budget-friendly options for all business sizes thanks in part to its elegant simplicity.

Type: Collaborative email management for Gmail

Best for: Growing teams wanting a simple, elegant solution that works inside Gmail

Free trial: 14 days

Keeping Pricing: Starts at $14/month per user (monthly billing) or $12/month per user (annual billing)

#2. Freshworks

Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk) is an alternative customer service email management software that allows you to handle high volumes of email by unifying your support across all different channels, including WhatsApp and social media. It also can double as a CRM tool. 

The feature that makes this tool stand out is its AI-powered automations. This gives you automated support agents and functionality that helps make organizing and responding to customer inquiries easier. Considering this functionality is still in its infancy, don’t rely on it to be overly robust just yet. But we’re excited to see how it evolves in the future.

Freshworks does offer a range of non-AI automation features as well, allowing for the easy assignment of tickets and the creation of streamlined workflows. You can also set up a self-service knowledge base to direct customers toward answers before opening support inquiries – and they have no-code bots and widgets that can help streamline this process.

Overall, I’m a fan of the interface and the CRM functionality. Large sales-focused businesses especially might value these features and be able to justify the cost since they save on a separate CRM subscription. Just beware that you’ll need to pay for the higher-priced tiers if you require any type of advanced reporting.

Type: AI-powered customer engagement platform

Best for: Established businesses needing advanced CRM

Free trial: 21 days

Freshworks pricing: Starts at $29/month per user (monthly billing) or $21/month per user (annual billing)

#3. Superhuman

Superhuman is email management software for large organizations who want to process more emails, and do it faster. If you have an email bottleneck, Superhuman adds extra features to your current inbox to help you battle through it faster.

Right off the bat, you can see that it comes at a higher price point than the alternatives. But it’s worth diving into the functionality to see if it’s justifiable for your needs.

It works with artifical intelligence to analyze your emails and identify a writing style for your brand. Then it helps you compose AI responses to emails to speed up response times.

The software also splits your inbox so you can prioritize the emails that matter most. It can send you automatic reminders to follow up on unreplied emails, snooze emails like an alarm clock, and view the read status of your emails.

While the AI response feature is a great innovation, I wouldn’t count on outputs to be perfect.  Just like most AI tools at the moment, responses can sound somewhat robotic and require finessing from intelligent humans.

Type: Speed-focused email client

Best for: High-volume email users in large corporations

Free trial: 14 days

Superhuman pricing: $30/month per user (billed monthly); no annual billing option

#4. HelpSpot

HelpSpot is a tool that helps enterprises scale their customer service. It’s a ticketing tool that’s highly customizable.

You’re given the option to self-host, or go with the default cloud-based hosting.

Once you’re onboarded to their platform, you’ll have a wide range of customization options. You can connect other tools in your ecosystem via the API. You’ll be able to get a bird’s eye view over your support help desk with their reporting tools. You can also set up a self-service knowledge base, which is uniquely organized in the form of a book.

If you require an on-premise tool for security, compliance or other reasons, it can be a great option. For technical teams, there’s nothing else that compares when it comes to customization. That flexibility just comes at a trade-off with the slightly outdated interface.

Type: Flexible ticketing system

Best for: Enterprise teams requiring extensive customization

Free trial: 21 days

HelpSpot pricing: Starts at $24/month per user (billed monthly), or $20/month per user (billed annually)

#5. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is HubSpot’s customer service tool.

If you’re a Hubspot user already, it’s easy to integrate and the two tools play nicely together. Used in conjunction with HubSpot’s CRM, it can give you more insights into the journeys of your customers. You can keep track of their actions and provide a more personalized experience along multiple touchpoints.

The tool gives you a customer portal where customers can submit their tickets. On the back end, your team can track and organize responses.

The knowledge base functionality is perhaps what sticks out most. It feels a lot more robust than other comparable tools, with analytics and features that help increase the ability for customers to self-serve.

Just consider the price point and be sure to analyze price jumps between plans. While some teams might easily be able to justify it, growing teams may find they’re paying for functionality they’ll never use. 

Type: Comprehensive CRM suite

Best for: Large marketing-focused organizations already using HubSpot

Free trial: 14 days

HubSpot Service Hub pricing: Starts at $50/month (billed monthly), or $45/month (billed annually)

#6. Help Scout

Help Scout is an email management software that allows you to log into their cloud-based web app and manage your customer support from there.

You link customers to the portal to open tickets and request support.

When you log in for the first time, it definitely feels a lot more intuitive than a lot of the other web app tools. It has a help desk, standard collaboration features (notes, shared inboxes, etc) and ticket assignment functionality.  

There’s also a live chat feature that can allow your team to respond in real-time to inquiries on your help desk page.

Overall, it’s an ideal solution for smaller companies. Growing teams may find themselves restricted in terms of features as they scale up.

Type: Collaborative inbox

Best for: Small static teams with straightforward needs

Free trial: 15 days

Help Scout pricing: Starts at $20/month per user (billed monthly), or $16/month per user (billed annually)

#7. HappyFox

HappyFox is another option for large businesses that require custom solutions.

You have to go through a sales process to get a custom quote for your team’s needs, and overall can expect bigger discounts as team size increases. Most likely, you’ll need to commit to annual billing and pricing will be higher than most other solutions.

The UI is slightly outdated compared to some more modern cloud-based tools but overall offers all of the features you could possibly need, including:

• Canned responses
• Ticketing
• Private notes
• Collision detection
• Tasks
• Workflow automations
• Knowledge base
• Multiple departments

What stands out most is the workflow automation functionality. You can create sophisticated, multi-step processes that help make your team more efficient – yet it doesn’t seem overly complex.

Just note that some features only unlock at higher tiers, forcing you to upgrade.

Type: Advanced workflow automation platform

Best for: Large IT and HR departments

Free trial: 14 days

HappyFox pricing: Custom pricing (typically higher), contact sales for a quote

#8. Front

Front is a simple, streamlined customer operations platform that offers omnichannel support. It also requires the use of a separate tab and login, or also offers a mobile app.

As a user, the interface feels natural – almost like an email tool. On top of the standard customer support tool features, you can also add live chat functionality, route tickets, and view customer history and data. Teams can also communicate within the app, having internal conversations or drafting responses together.

Inside the platform, managers can conduct customer feedback surveys and analyze reports showcasing team performance.

Be sure to keep an eye out for which features are included in each plan. A number of key features require premium plans, and many teams may find the basic tier limited for their needs.

Type: Multi-channel inbox management

Best for: Enterprises with intricate communication needs

Free trial: 7 days

Front pricing: Starts at $19/month per user (billed monthly), or $15/month per user (billed annually)

#9. LiveAgent

LiveAgent started as a live chat tool, but now supports multiple channels. It can integrate with phone, Whatsapp, WordPress and most social media apps (and does it fairly smoothly).

It’s essentially a ticketing system that organizes your customer conversations and enables your agents to collaborate.

Agents can switch channels easily, and view the history of a client across channels at a glance.

Their language support feels more robust than most of the other tools, and may be of interest to large e-commerce businesses that sell across a number of different countries.

Type: Omnichannel support platform

Best for: Established e-commerce businesses

Free trial: 14 days

LiveAgent pricing: Starts at $39/month per agent (billed monthly), or $31/month per agent (billed annually)

Benefits of using email management software for customer service

There are a number of benefits to using customer service email management tools:

• A perfectly organized inbox: Support teams that struggle to manage high volumes of customer inquiries can restore order, set up organizational systems, and increase response times.
• Clear visibility into email status: Get clarity around which emails have been addressed or require follow-ups, eliminating confusion and duplicate efforts.
• Easy assignment and tracking of email responses: Simplify the process of assigning specific inquiries to team members. Track past interactions, achieve balanced workloads, eliminate inefficiencies, and improve the quality of support.
• Quicker response times: Reduce customer wait times for replies, improving customer satisfaction and trust.
• More consistent communication: Enhance team cohesion and ensure team members respond to customers with a clear understanding of a ticket’s history.
• Better team collaboration: Boost problem-solving by allowing team members to collaborate on responses and share insights into customer interactions.
• Fewer irrelevant emails: Easily filter out spam or irrelevant inquiries so your team can focus on genuine customer issues.
• Make data-driven decisions: Unlock the ability to analyze performance metrics like response times, ticket resolution rates, and team performance. Identify areas for improvement and measure the impact of changes.
• Decrease support team turnover: Reduce burnout and increase support staff satisfaction levels with a more streamlined, organized workflows and assignment processes.
• Simplify new staff member training: Speed up the onboarding process for new hires with simplified, structured systems.

How to choose the right email management tool

There’s a wide range of customer service email management software options out there.

Having a clearer understanding of your exact needs can help simplify your decision-making.

Here are some cautions to keep in mind when selecting a tool:

• ⚠️ Project your budget: Estimate projected future team sizes and check pricing at different stages of growth. Be cautious, as some tools spike in price as team size increases.
• ⚠️ Integrations with existing platforms: Look for a tool that integrates seamlessly with your current tools to minimize the need for new processes and training.
• ⚠️ Review data ownership policies: Do your due diligence. Ensure your chosen tool gives you full ownership over your data and makes it easy to take it with you.
• ⚠️ Consider scalability: Ensure your tool makes it easy to add and remove team members as your organization grows and evolves.
• ⚠️ Choose only the features you need: Research features to ensure you’re only paying for functionality that your business processes require. Oftentimes added features are just distractions that complicate processes and add hidden costs.

Frequently Asked Questions About Customer Service Email Tools

Streamlining customer support

Tackling support requests becomes much more streamlined when you use customer service email management software. 

Packed with features that help you collaborate, automate, report and interact, upgrading your support processes with a tool should be a no-brainer for anyone looking to improve customer satisfaction and increase loyalty.

Traditional email solutions like Gmail or Outlook may be great for personal emails or very small businesses, but lead to a bottleneck when your business starts to grow.

Consider the features that best fit your business and give your selected tool a test run before committing.

Remember, by keeping your customers happy, you’re not just putting out fires – you’re investing in relationships that help fuel the growth of your business.