6 SupportBee Alternatives to Try

When starting out with customer support, many companies opt for a simple email inbox such as Gmail. This type of solution is sufficient for handling a small number of queries, and a small team of agents. 

As your company grows and your customer base expands, an email inbox becomes ill-fitting for your needs. It lacks features for collaboration and reporting, and there is no way to track the status of the ticket. 

That’s why companies turn to support software like SupportBee to help them manage their incoming customer support tickets. SupportBee is packed with features that help teams of support reps work collaboratively and efficiently. 

Whether you’re already using SupportBee or simply looking to adopt a new tool for your tech stack, we’ve included SupportBee and a list of alternatives for you to try. 

A complete help desk, inside Gmail?

Keeping turns your Gmail into a fully featured help desk. It's not magic, but it feels magical.

See How in 2 Minutes

What is SupportBee? 

SupportBee is help desk software that includes a ticketing system that helps teams organize, prioritize and collaborate on customer support emails. It’s really very straightforward – it’s like an email inbox except you can do so much more with your emails. 

One of SupportBee’s main features is its shared inbox. It works just like regular email, staying invisible to customers but providing a robust user experience for agents in the background. What makes SupportBee different from a regular email inbox is the ability to assign tickets to particular agents, comment on support tickets and submit draft emails for review. 

Another of SupportBee’s features is its integrated knowledge base. A knowledge base enables customers to help themselves by consulting a support article instead of turning to an agent. The knowledge base also integrates with SupportBee’s shared inbox, so that agents can easily include links to relevant support articles when replying to customers. 

What really sets SupportBee apart is its customer portal for your customers to send, manage and track the progress of their support requests. This gives customers visibility into how your company is handling their tickets and eliminates frustration, as customers know what is going on. 

SupportBee is very similar to traditional email, so the system is easy to set up and learn. It also offers reports to measure the most important metrics like the average first response time, and the number of tickets and replies. Soon your agents will be working much more productively and have their morale raised by using a platform that was designed for their needs. 

6 SupportBee alternatives

SupportBee isn’t the only solution on the market, however. We’ll now go through the top alternatives for SupportBee. 

1. Tidio

Tidio is support software that combines live chat and chatbot tools to enable your business to provide the best service and develop lasting relationships with your customers. You can create custom chatbots all without coding and use them to automate away 40% of common customer queries. 

Tidio allows you to combine all your messaging channels into one platform, including live chat, email inbox, Messenger, and Instagram, and supports all devices: desktop, mobile, and tablet. When customer communications are all in one place, you are able to see the full context of that customer’s interactions with your business. 

Tidio empowers your customer support team and improves ticket resolution. You can make sure to answer the most critical issues straight away due to views with assigned and unassigned messages. Agents can answer repetitive questions at speed with quick reply templates which are reusable responses. You can track the performance of your agents thanks to advanced analytics in-built to Tidio’s system. 

Tidio’s unique selling point is its live chat functionality which connects you with your customers instantly. It’s possible to add Tidio live chat software to your website in minutes, enabling you to chat to visitors and transform them into satisfied customers. With Tidio, you can track your visitors and view which pages of your website they browse, enabling you to personalize your communication.

Tidio pricing starts from $0 per month. 

2. Gladly

Gladly is a help desk software for B2C companies who are looking to maximize the lifetime value of their customers. What makes Gladly stand out is their assertion that they treat customers like people rather than tickets. It approaches customer interactions as conversations, enabling your agents to keep the personal touch. 

You have access to a customer’s order history so that means customer’s aren’t asked for as much information. All channels are combined together in a customer history so agents are able to view past interactions, including voice. You can view the customer as a whole person, and enhance your ability to provide outstanding support. 

Gladly makes self-service a real possibility for your company by being able to pull FAQs into the chat experience. You can limit the number of inbound requests to your support team by making answers to common questions available through your help center or chat widget, so customers are able to find the answers they need. You can get customers to self-serve basic questions like delivery status, past bookings, and upcoming reservations so customers can get answers that are relevant to them without contacting an agent.

Gladly provides natively built-in chat support so you can interact with customers directly on your website. You can answer common questions and allow customers to switch to different channels without using vital context. You can even complete transactions securely using the chat, increasing the chance that your business can make a sale. 

Gladly pricing starts at $0 per month. 

3. Gmelius

Gmelius is email and team collaboration software designed to help your business provide excellent customer service directly from Gmail. Gmelius has powerful integrations with tools like Slack and Trello, so you don’t need to switch to another tool to benefit from its capabilities. Gmelius offers the ability to view your emails as Kanban boards so you can easily keep track of your workflows. 

Because Gmelius integrates with Gmail, you don’t need to leave your favorite tool to benefit from its uses. Your team doesn’t have to learn a new tool in order to upgrade their customer support. Like SupportBee, Gmelius removes the need to share passwords and allows you to leave behind the chaos of using traditional email for support. 

Read More: 5 Gmelius Alternatives to Consider for Customer Support

You can assign emails to an agent with a single click, and track the status of a ticket so nothing falls through the cracks. Quick notes allow you to communicate with colleagues within the Gmelius interface so there’s no need to forward emails or turn to an external tool. You can reply to emails with pre-built templates, saving time on repetitive queries. 

In Gmelius, it’s possible to only give access to shared labels with other teams. This means you don’t have to share a whole inbox with collaborating departments, and instead you only share relevant emails.

Gmelius pricing starts from $7 per agent per month. 

4. Jitbit

Jitbit is a help desk software and ticketing system that enables you to deliver amazing support to your customers and improve your customer management. Jitbit is very quick to set up and allows you to immediately start handling customer tickets after forwarding support emails to the help desk app. 

What stands out about Jitbit is its availability as both a SaaS and on-premise solution, so you can choose whatever best suits your needs. The primary focus is email, but Jitbit also offers live chat, knowledge base software, integrations and chatbots. Jitbits mobile app allows you to support customers while on the move. 

Jitbit lets your company automate the repetitive parts of customer support, saving you lots of time in the process. You can use Jibit’s powerful automation triggers to send automatic replies, assign agents to tickets and set ticket due dates.

Jitbit’s team mailbox is the core component of its system. It’s as easy to use as a shared inbox and offers advanced reporting, bulk actions and ticket merging capabilities. It’s easy to prioritize your support ticket queue and see which tickets need an urgent response. 

Jitbit pricing starts at $29 per month. 

5. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is help desk software for large teams who want to improve their ticket management. It offers an omnichannel customer experience, bringing all your customer communication channels together in one dashboard. This makes your conversations with customers more meaningful and productive. Freshdesk comes with AI-powered chatbots that enable you to automate many customer service interactions. 

Freshdesk’s main feature is its customer support ticketing software. Prioritize, categorize, and assign tickets to the right agents to deliver a better customer experience. Freshdesk converts issues from any channel into a ticket so nothing ever gets missed. You can filter tickets based on particular properties so the most critical tickets that agents should work on are emphasized in the inbox.

Freshdesk offers lots of features like collision detection to prevent duplicate replies, canned responses which are saved replies to common issues, and the ability to merge tickets about the same issue into one. Multiple team members can own tickets and you can include teammates in a discussion right inside the ticket for full context. In Freshdesk, it’s possible to split tickets with more than one task into sub-tickets. 

Automations in Freshdesk analyze every new ticket as soon as customers contact you. Automations then execute actions that depend on what channel a customer has contacted you on, the subject of the message, and so on. For example, tickets can be automatically prioritized and assigned to the correct team based on whether the customer has contacted you over social media and what they have written to you about.

Freshdesk pricing starts at $0 per month. 

If you want to read more about Freshdesk alternatives, check out our article. 

6. Keeping

The last option on our list is our very own Keeping, the help desk alternative to SupportBee that works directly inside Gmail. There’s no need to learn brand new software, as Keeping plugs right into email and enables you to instantly start supporting customers collaboratively. Its user friendly interface means teams can get started right away. 

As we’ve already mentioned, using a traditional email inbox isn’t sufficient for teams who want to scale their support. Keeping offers many features that make handling customer emails a breeze, such as enabling teams to receive, respond to and assign support emails directly from within their own mailbox. Your customer support emails are organized in a new section of your mailbox, and are separated from your regular emails so you can keep things clear.

There’s more. Keeping prevents agents from duplicating their replies by offering advanced collision detection, so agents can tell when another team member is already working on a response. It’s easy to assign requests to different team members so everyone knows who is responsible for what. 

One of the biggest reasons why help desk software is better than email is the reporting it offers. Use Keeping’s advanced reporting to get the data on how your team responds to customers. You can track first response time, volume of requests, and how each of your team members responds to emails.

Keeping pricing starts at $8 per agent per month. 

Wrapping up

When your team has outgrown email, it’s time to consider a better solution such as SupportBee. The main advantage of upgrading your software is that teams can collaborate much more effectively on customer requests and you can begin to scale your team. If you’re wondering whether investing in the right tools is worth it, consider the importance of customer service. 83% of customers stated that good customer service is the most important factor when deciding what to buy. 

So take your time when evaluating the different customer support solutions out there and keep a look out for these SupportBee alternatives. SupportBee may not be the perfect fit for your needs, and you might want to consider an option like Keeping. Keeping allows your team to take email to the next level while retaining all the features that drew you to email as a channel in the first place. Your customer support agents will be more productive and happier when they can benefit from Keeping as a help desk tool inside Gmail. The transition will be seamless and your team will be able to help more customers, faster.