Best Customer Service Email Management Software List
So, you’re starting every day reading emails and thinking you’ll reply to only the most important ones, only to realize a couple hours have gone by and you’re practically where you started. I get it—email management is tricky. So how do we become more efficient at dealing with our email, so it doesn’t overwhelm us?
For many, fixing the pain of email could involve at least one inbox strategy, one triage strategy, and one boxing strategy. Mark Auzenne put it well in his podcast when he said, "email is a necessary evil". These email software options will help you handle large requests, provide better self-service, and create more professional emails to help you focus on what matters most: your customers.
In this article, I’ll quickly take you through a reliable list of some of the best paid and free email management software to help you and your team, and finish the article by showing how to incorporate them to improve your customer experience management.
Email Management Software Comparison Criteria
What criteria do I use to evaluate these email management tools? Good email management software will provide an abundance of useful solutions such as:
- User Interface (UI): Is it clean and attractive? Are tickets and requests easy to organize and share? Is there good functionality, personalization, and shared inboxes?
- Usability: Is it easy to master, or could it take some time to learn? It is easy to set up shared inboxes and manage roles so that your customer service team has access to what they need? Does the company offer good tech support, a knowledge base, user support, FAQs, tutorials, and training?
- Integrations: Most tools integrate with email; it’s great if they can integrate with your CRMs, too.
- Value for $: How appropriate is the price for the features, capabilities, and use case? Is pricing clear, transparent, and flexible? Do the price points suit larger or smaller businesses and startups?
Email Management Software Key Features
- Reporting and analytics: the best software has the ability to see email open rates and insights into how your team is doing with responses and statistics
- Workflow automation: the ability to automate processes and organize tasks for your team helps increase efficiency and get you back to what is important
- Collaboration: team collaboration is important — as are shared inboxes to create better flow management
- Templates: customization of emails and templates helps to create a more personable connection with your customers as well as improves workability
- Personalization: gamification, custom tags, awards, and colorful interfaces are important to help team workflow feel less boring
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Customer Service Email Management Software
Here’s a brief description of each of the best email management software on my list showing what it does best, plus screenshots to showcase some of the features.
Salesforce Service Cloud
Best for integrating with legacy software
Salesforce Service Cloud is a customer service software that is designed to digitize a company’s contact center to help connect customers to the right people, manage customer queries through email, and resolve cases.
This solution helps improve customer service productivity thanks to the platform’s built-in tools, which include Customer 360, real-time data tools, automation, and email integration. It's designed to seamlessly integrate with a company’s systems, including legacy systems that companies can’t afford to replace. This platform offers pre-built integration applications and queue management features. It also supports ticketing, routing, and escalating customer queries.
Salesforce Service Cloud equips businesses with the necessary tools to manage emails effectively and improve customer service. Users can create email templates and use them in resolving customer cases and in auto-responses to streamline the management process. All of the Service Cloud plans come with email management features that include email integration with Outlook, email templates, auto-response emails, and email case capture. It scales as the business grows and businesses can easily use the platform while handling additional demand, driving further growth and increasing productivity.
Using Salesforce Service Cloud reduces the cost of customer service, shortens resolution time, reduces agent admin and ramp time, and drives efficiency through automation, personalized engagement, and connected experiences with Salesforce Genie Customer Data Cloud. In addition to Service Cloud’s automation and case management features, users can use add-on features to increase the utility of the platform as an email management solution.
Hiver
Best customer service email software for Gmail users
Gmail was not designed for customer service – Hiver bills itself as having a “bordering devotional love for email” and looking at their interface, I fully agree.
With trusted success from over 1,500 companies, G-Suite customer teams will love the productivity of improved response times, shared inboxes, and better customer connection.
You’ll love their response personalization and email templates.
On top of everything, Hiver has great price points – starting out at $7/month/user to get your customer service team up and running.
SendinBlue
Best all-in-one tool for small businesses
If you’re looking for a tool that does marketing automation, email campaigning, transactional emails, and personalizes CRM, Sendinblue takes the cake.
Small businesses will love the accessibility of creating landing pages, signup forms, Facebook ads, and retargeting features. The free plan alone allows for up to 300 emails per day with unlimited contact options.
The lite version starts at $25/month, and the tool also offers larger plans for enterprise businesses.
HappyFox
Best for customer-facing help desks
HappyFox is a collaborative, cloud-based ticketing system providing a speedy support interface for your customers. Trusted by Fortune 500 brands such as Lowe’s and LeapFrog, they aim to create a “one-stop shop” help desk to help your team keep incoming emails together, and stay organized and in control.
Users will enjoy the simplicity of using canned responses to address repeated queries as well as the useful reporting widgets and customization.
HappyFox has a pricing system based on the number of support agents that starts out at $24/month/user.
Freshdesk
Best for small business service desks
Aside from being one of LinkedIn’s top companies in “where India wants to work now”, Freshdesk gears its collaborative ticketing system and AI to create solutions for your team in any industry.
Their AI integrated ticketing system, “Freddy”, saves you from all the mundane and repetitive tasks to save you and your customers time.
Their product also connects with different tools such as Slack. After the 21-day free trial, Freshdesk offers their “blossom” plan at $15/month/agent.
Help Scout
Best for customer support and experience
Help Scout is a more personalized email manager used by the likes of Grubhub, Reddit, and Postmark. Whether you have a team of 5 people or 500, the interactive layout keeps everything organized so nothing slips through the cracks.
Help Scout teams will also love the “customer sidebar tool” functionality which allows an easy view of contact information, conversations data, as well as activity and data from other apps.
Help Scout’s standard pricing plan starts out at $20/month/user, which includes 3 mailboxes, and 1 docs site.
There is no full free version yet, but Help Scout offers a small free trial period.
Pega Platform
Best quick response to large email quantities
This advanced email bot takes action on your email by using award winning case management to create channel-less experiences and streamline your customer service operations.Their machine learning technology constantly learns to provide the most accurate responses for your customers’ issues.
Pega uses a simple-to-configure interface, and intelligent routing to triage emails to the right person. Pega provides four “editions” dependent by case and business type starting from $97.
Those include a customer engagement edition, an enterprise edition, a case management edition (starting at $0.47/case), and finally, a unified messaging edition.
Drag
Best for collaboration from a single place
Drag is an all-in-one help desk software within your Gmail allowing you to manage, share, and collaborate without switching to another help desk. The integration helps your team build customer relations and workflows for better success, as well as includes the ability to keep track of team member performance.
With their real-time insight tool, you can always know how your team is doing in terms of replies, activity, and tasks.
Drag offers a great free option for individuals, and the pro version costs $10/month/user and includes unlimited shared inboxes, boards, and collaboration.
Front
Best for team collaboration and workflow management
Front is a comprehensive platform for customer requests and communication used by over 6,000 high-impact teams. You can create email templates, instantly route messages, and receive quick integration feedback to help with workflow management.
Front excels at collaboration through shared messages so you and your team can access them and communicate internally. Front starts out at 9$/user/month for 3 team channels.
They also offer a 7-day free trial.
Clover
Best note taking app for combining notes with project management
Clover acts as your daily workspace, offering a range of functions that include notes, tasks, whiteboards, and a daily planner. All these are combined in a streamlined workflow.
Why I picked Clover: This software tool introduces a new way of recording your thoughts, tracking tasks, managing your daily agenda, and planning work. It’s easy to capture ideas and plan tasks, with incomplete tasks automatically rolling over to the next day.
Clover also acts as a fully-fledged task manager, collaboration tool, and planner. You can add due dates, color code tasks, and network your ideas. Clover automatically adds backlinks to connect your pages where appropriate.
Clover Standout Features and Integrations
Features include rich media, whiteboarding, markdown formatting, code blocks with syntax highlighting, inline task features, dynamic references, and templates.
Integrations are available natively with tools such as Figma, Google Calendar, Soundcloud and YouTube.
Clover Plans and Pricing
Plans begin at $10/user/month. A free plan with limited features is also available.
Pros
- Everything works together effectively
- Makes project management frictionless
- A great productivity app
Cons
- Occasionally buggy
- Lacks advanced features
Best Customer Service Email Management Software Summary Table
| Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Salesforce Service Cloud Best for integrating with legacy software | 14-day free trial is available | Plans start at $25/user/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
| 2 | Hiver Best customer service email software for Gmail users | 7-day free trial | From $19/agent/month | Visit Website |
| 3 | SendinBlue Best all-in-one tool for small businesses | Freemium version available | From $25/month | Visit Website |
| 4 | HappyFox Best for customer-facing help desks | Free demo | $39/agent/month (min 5 agents) | Visit Website |
| 5 | Freshdesk Best for small business service desks | 21-day free trial | From $18/agent/month | Visit Website |
| 6 | Help Scout Best for customer support and experience | Free trial | From $25/user/month | Visit Website |
| 7 | Pega Platform Best quick response to large email quantities | Not available | From $0.47/case | Visit Website |
| 8 |  Drag Best for collaboration from a single place | Not available | From $10/month/user | Visit Website |
| 9 |  Front Best for team collaboration and workflow management | 7-day free trial available | Plans start at $19/user/month | Visit Website |
| 10 |  Clover Best note taking app for combining notes with project management | Free plan with limited features | From $10/user/month | Visit Website |
Need expert help selecting the right Email Software?
We’ve joined up with the software comparison platform Crozdesk.com to assist you in finding the right software. Crozdesk’s Email Software advisors can create a personalized shortlist of software solutions with unbiased recommendations to help you identify the solutions that best suit your business's needs. Through our partnership you get free access to their bespoke software selection advice, removing both time and hassle from the research process.
It only takes a minute to submit your requirements and they will give you a quick call at no cost or commitment. Based on your needs you’ll receive customized software shortlists listing the best-fitting solutions from their team of software advisors (via phone or email). They can even connect you with your selected vendor choices along with community negotiated discounts. To get started, please complete the form below:
Other Customer Service Email Management Software Options
If you want a few more email management tools, I’ve got you covered.
- Appian - Best for teams who need custom BPM creation and features.
- Gmelius - Another good Gmail-integrated email management tool for small businesses.
- Outpost - A shared inbox to boost team productivity.
- SpamTitan - A great anti-spam filter for businesses.
Decided you need more than just email support? Try: 10 Best Help Desk Software
Email Management for Pros
A great email software manager that has quick, customizable responses, gives your business a personality while allowing your team to efficiently solve any customer issue will lead to higher overall satisfaction, in terms of your customer satisfaction metrics. Mastering email isn’t easy yet understanding how to incorporate one or more of these tools into your daily routine will let you get the most out of your time.
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