The Best Customer Service Automation Software List
Here’s a shortlist of the best customer service automation software:
When your customers need your help, it's important for you to be there for them. That being said, it can also be difficult to manage a sky high pile of requests. The best customer service automation software platforms help your support agents meet this challenge by prioritizing certain customer requests, automating responses to others, and organizing everything with an easy-to-use ticketing system.
In short? Customer experience automation has the power to increase agent productivity while mitigating the risk of team burnout. In this article, I've gathered a comprehensive list of the best customer service automation software available on the market today. Let's get started.
Related Read: Pros And Cons Of Customer Service Automation
What is Customer Service Automation Software?
Customer service automation software are cloud-based tools that enhance the productivity and effectiveness of your customer service efforts. These tools help your customer service team to:
- Automate repetitive tasks with features like canned responses
- Collect customer data + customer feedback
- Offer omnichannel communication including chat software
- Organize complex issues via a ticketing system
- Track customer conversations as they are escalated + resolved
- Monitor agent productivity via several analytics metrics
- Enhance your overall customer experience by providing more timely and effective responses
Whether you're a startup, a mid-sized business, or a global enterprise, there is a customer service automation software platform that can deliver on your needs, and within your budget. And this comprehensive list features the best service software available today.
Customer Service Automation Software Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best customer service automation software? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): Are the layouts clean and easy to navigate? Does it allow for interesting customization and personalization for customer support?
- Usability: How intuitive is the software? Does the software have accessible technical support? How much value will your team be able to extract from each program?
- Integrations: Is it easy to connect with all your apps or only a small number of third-party apps? For example, can it integrate with social media in order to automate the flow of customer inquiries to your service team?
- Value for $: How does the price for the features and capabilities look like down the line for your customer support team? Is pricing flexible? Does price make sense when taking a long-term perspective?
Customer Service Automation Software Key Features
- Shared inboxes
- Automated email templates
- Social media integration
- Setup and training support
- Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence
- Self-service portals
- Help bases
- AI Chatbots/Live chat
- Automated replies and responses
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Customer Service Automation Software
Here’s a brief description of each of the best customer service automation software. I’ll show you what each one does best, who it works best for, plus screenshots to showcase some of the features.
Salesforce Service Cloud
Best scalable automation software
Salesforce Service Cloud is a customer service automation software with features that help businesses scale their service processes as they grow.
This solution helps teams manage customer queries, resolve cases, and connect customers with the right people to resolve issues through live chat while streamlining the entire process with only a few clicks. It also makes complicated processes easier with the platform’s builders. These builders are low- and no-code, making it easy to automate workflows, simplify complex processes, and adapt processes with a flexible customer service platform.
Companies can use case management to automatically create cases from web queries and emails, send auto-responses, and route cases to certain queues or agents to resolve cases at a faster rate. The platform also effectively helps businesses manage their workflows and handle large numbers of cases through auto-responses and auto-assignments, which improves the quality of customer service.
Utilizing Salesforce Service Cloud’s automation features helps improve a company’s efficiency in handling cases. Lightning Flow Automation can also be used by Essentials and Professional users for five processes and flows each, while Enterprise and Unlimited users can create an unlimited number of processes and workflows. This means the relatively affordable Service Cloud plans are still useful and functional for smaller businesses.
Hiver
Best shared inbox and Gmail management software
Hiver’s service software combines with G Suite to create a cohesive automation tool for your inbox—this allows your team to do such things as assign emails to a certain user, change the status of an email, and apply tags.
With Hiver’s “Round-Robin” tool agents can toggle availability and also ensure that all emails have a dedicated department or team member.
On top of everything, Hiver incorporates a colorful and neat interface so your email doesn’t look so boring.
Hiver starts out at $7/month/user for smaller teams while their most popular pro plan comes out to $37/month/user.
Tenfold
Best customer service software for a growing sales team
Tenfold’s Integration system unifies existing communication platforms such as Salesforce, Cisco and Microsoft Dynamics to empower your marketing automation team to use channels your customers are already familiar with.
Their useful Chrome extension allows for instant data access across any of your tabs at any time. Personalization, customer profile screens, knowledge base, and universal communication layers enable customer insights at the point of interaction.
Tenfold offers standard, advanced and additional options plans only available at request pricing from the company.
HubSpot
Best software for entry-level businesses
HubSpot knows that customers expect more, so they strive to bring all your data and channels together into one space. 80,000 users in 120 countries benefit from their software – their 24/7 services, attractive interface, and 500+ integrations will please teams of all types and sizes. The platform is easy to learn and provides tools that help to simplify customer needs and improve insights.
HubSpot offers an amazing free plan for entry-level teams that provides ticket managing, live chat, team email, and reporting.
Their “starter” plan begins at $45/month including great features like conversion routing and multiple ticket pipelines.
Freshdesk
Best help desk with dedicated mobile application
Freshdesk puts an end to to-do lists by automating everything – this customer service software provides a sorting hat for tickets and a smart auto-assign to get the issues to the right agent immediately.Their automations are one of a kind – they are able to remind, alert, and bring tickets to the right agents.
Freshdesk is easy to set up and manage with rule-like workflow documents, as well as having an audit log to make changes at any time. A sandbox lets you test and run changes before syncing them to a live account. Their first plan for standard customer support starts at $15/agent/month.
Freshdesk also offers a 21-day free trial.
Kayako
Best multi-departmental integration software
Kayako’s help desk combines an abundance of solutions with customer automation support, shared inboxes, ticketing software, internal help desk, and e-commerce support. With their context driven automation service, Kayako shows how a customer has interacted with your business from the first step.
Another great feature I’ve found is the 24/7 customer self-service portal – even when your team isn’t in the office or at the call center, customers can find the answers they need.
Kayako’s Inbox plan for small teams starts at $15/month/agent while their more popular growing team package starts at $30/month/agent.
Zingtree
Best sales automation for customer troubleshooting
The ultimate self-service portal trusted by companies like SpaceX, Dropbox, and Harman. Zingtree deflects tickets and empowers customers to pinpoint information, select the right product, and lets them generate automatic quotes.
Their automated actions and knowledge base allows you to continue growing your business with little back-and-forth to maintain a better, faceless customer relationship.
On top of custom CSS design, integrations and push commands, their Essential plan starts from 25$.
This plan is best for agent scripting, includes 5-25 users, and up to 10 “trees”.
Helpshift
Best advanced “chat” ticketing software
Helpshift’s service software uses bots to create a “problem intent” pathway—they collect information and complete rote tasks to guide the customer to the right agent or department, even sometimes completely solving issues without human interaction.Their SensAI intent classification bot uses semantics and contextuality to solve issues instead of traditional “rule-based” labeling algorithms.
Helpshift makes sure you never get lost in translation, so they provide you and your customers with a knowledge base support system in over 180 languages.
Their essential, elite, and business starter packs are available at request pricing.
Khoros
Best platform to manage social media and review sites
Khoros is an AI-Powered digital service trusted by over 2000 companies that aims to greatly scale your automation and workflow capacity through conversational-based workflow.Khoros social care consolidates customer interactions from your social media sites while using its modern chat and messaging features to communicate with customers on their favorite platforms.
Your team will love the modernized contact center and adaptable learning curves.Pricing is available upon request.
Tidio
Best customer service platform for SMBs
Tidio is a customer service platform that gives you the ability to level up your customer support and helps you generate more sales. Tidio gives your customers an easily accessible live chat widget that makes your business available to them 24/7, while AI-powered chatbots engage your customers in real-time, so you can sell more. Tidio is currently being used on 300,000+ websites worldwide.
Tidio is designed and built for small, growing businesses. It is delightfully easy to set up and use, so you can transform your customer service into a sales machine in no time.
Connect Messenger, Instagram, live chat, and email to Tidio multichannel and answer all messages from one place, also on mobile. Tidio easily integrates with all websites and platforms like WordPress, Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce, and many others.
Tidio is free for 3 operators and up to 100 unique visitors. Paid plans costs from $39/month and come with a 7-day free trial.
The Best Customer Service Automation Software Summary Table
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Salesforce Service Cloud Best scalable automation software | 14-day free trial is available | Plans start at $25/user/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
2 | Hiver Best shared inbox and Gmail management software | 7-day free trial | From $19/agent/month | Visit Website |
3 | Tenfold Best customer service software for a growing sales team | Not available | Pricing Upon Request | Visit Website |
4 | HubSpot Best software for entry-level businesses | 14-day free trial + freemium version available | From $45/month | Visit Website |
5 | Freshdesk Best help desk with dedicated mobile application | 21-day free trial | From $18/agent/month | Visit Website |
6 | Kayako Best multi-departmental integration software | 14-day free trial | From $15/user/month | Visit Website |
7 | Zingtree Best sales automation for customer troubleshooting | Not available | From 25$. This plan is best for agent scripting, includes 5-25 users, and up to 10 “trees”. | Visit Website |
8 | Helpshift Best advanced “chat” ticketing software | Not available | Visit Website | |
9 | Khoros Best platform to manage social media and review sites | Not available | Pricing Upon Request | Visit Website |
10 | Tidio Best customer service platform for SMBs | 7-day free trial | From $19/user/month | Visit Website |
Need expert help selecting the right Customer Service Software?
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Other Customer Service Automation Software Options
Here’s a few more customer relationship management software options for you that didn’t make my top 10 list.
- Zendesk - Best price-friendly / affordable help desk
- Imprezian360 - Best accounting tool for quickbooks
- Ivanti ITSM - Best unified endpoint management solution tool
- Lilac Follow Up - Best CRM software for jewelry industry
- Voximplant Kit - Best smart queue tool
- Zoho Desk - Best mobile platform
- Streak - Best Gmail manager for hiring
- Customer Thermometer - Best for automation survey creation
- SAWIN - Best for companies with existing accounting software
- Bold360 - Best support for future-proof channels
- CustomerWise - Best automated escalation tool
- Front - Best for integration of unique and different apps
- Elevio - Best hotspot tools for contextual support
- HappyFox Help Desk - Best custom creation for support tickets
- Gorgias for Shopify - Best data integration and help desk for Shopify
- HelpCrunch - Best popup customization tool
- LogicNets - Best for remote application connection
- HelpDesk by Live Chat - Best software for small businesses
- Cayzu - Best global support for different languages and time zones
- User.com - Best Omni communication channels
What Do You Think About These Customer Service Automation Softwares?
Automation software that organizes and helps to cut down the need for human interaction can cut down reaction time, resolution times, and increase call deflection rates and ability for customers and clients to find answers on their own for better overall customer satisfaction.
As I maintained before a good automation software can solve more than just percentages, but can better reduce customer frustration through smarter AI and better self-help options.
Managers implementing these systems that help their agents can result in a more effective coaching method. Customer relationship management agents who use collaboration tools like shared inboxes and peer-reviewed help centers will function better.
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