Customer service email management software tools can help your teams fine-tune their email communications and serve customers better by providing engaging and helpful responses that resolve queries on time.  

As a case in point, Salesforce suggests that 27% of service leaders are piloting or planning to use email response management in the next 12-18 months to offer superior customer experience. 

However, choosing the right tool is essential to ensure it meets your requirements and is worth investing in. This article will help you pick the best email tool for your business.

Customer service email management software: A comparison

Plivo CX- Best for SMBs looking for a feature-rich, affordable customer service software tool to manage their emails

Plivo CX is a cloud-based customer service email management platform that allows you to manage all your customer emails effortlessly in one place and deliver outstanding customer experiences. The tool can drive your revenue 3x and ensure flawless customer engagement via powerful end-to-end email marketing activities. 

Aimed at simplifying communications with your target customers, it offers useful features and capabilities to transform your email handling. For example, you can create custom user journeys from the first email interaction to their current position. This will help you understand them better and provide tailored experiences. 

Using OpenAI-powered self-service chatbots, Plivo CX also reduces live agent requirements by 50%. These chatbots provide instant problem resolution with greater accuracy, as you can train them on custom datasets within the fringes of company guidelines.

Additionally, with live dashboards, you can get complete visibility on your customers, from their engagements to storefront activity and purchases, and optimize your team's performance and operations.

Key Features

• Omnichannel service: Leverage the Unified Agent Desktop to consolidate customer context and interaction history and deliver effortless omnichannel customer service across email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat
• AI-powered ticket handling: Automatically sorts and prioritizes customer requests, making sure urgent issues are handled first while also ensuring AI responses stay on-brand and follow your company rules
• Enhanced Communication & Efficiency: Share media like pictures and videos, use templates for quicker replies and internal notes for seamless teamwork, and effortlessly update AI agents with the latest information–all for smoother and more effective customer interactions.
• Reporting: Use historical reports to get deeper insights into communications between your team and customers. You can also collect customer feedback. These can help you better train your agents and boost their performance. 
• Security: Keep your email communications safe with Plivo CX’s enterprise-grade security with encryption and app authentication. Stay compliant with regulations like GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and ISO certification. 
• Integrations: Integrate with HubSpot, Help Scout, Zendesk, HappyFox, Salesforce, etc., for seamless and accurate data flow between systems 

Pros 

• Useful features like AI chatbots, granular dashboards for 360° view, customized workflows, agent coaching, etc.
• Effortless to use and quickly integrates with multiple tools
• Provides responsive support
• Industry-grade data security and privacy

Limitations 

• Doesn't have built-in tools to track how well agents are performing, make sure they meet quality standards
• Cannot help you decide how many agents you need at different times
• No mobile app to check or work on tickets when they're not at their desks
• Might not be the best choice if you get a lot of simple, repetitive customer support questions

Pricing

Omnichannel (annual plans):

• Growth: $29 per user per month
• Business: $69 per user per month
• Enterprise: Available on request

Voice-Only annual plans

• Growth: $25 per user per month
• Business: $40 per user per month
• Enterprise: Available on request

Chat-Only annual plans

• Growth: $15 per user per month
• Business: $30 per user per month
• Enterprise: Available on request

Ratings

G2: 4.5/5 (700+ reviews)

Freshworks - Best for smaller teams requiring essential customer email management features

Freshworks Customer Service Suite by Freshdesk is a popular option to manage customer emails. It offers an AI-powered, efficient solution to simplify email management for your support team and contribute to excellent customer service. 

You’ll get a unified interface for customer context from communication across all channels, with powerful AI chatbots to boost your ROI. Freshdesk lets you boost efficiency with powerful capabilities, including omnichannel solutions, advanced ticketing, self-service, Freddy AI for automating tasks, and more.

Key Features

• Personalization: Personalize experiences with detailed customer information and their interactions throughout their buyer journeys.
• Analytics: Get AI-driven analytics to solve emerging issues and empower agents with a centralized workspace to drive efficiency 
• Integrations: Integrations with popular tools like Shopify, salesforce, Jira, etc. 

Pros

• Repetitive tickets can be handled with a combination of canned responses, scenarios and other automation features
• Features like Add Note and Merge are extremely useful for managing and collaborating on tickets efficiently

Limitation 

• Some reported facing constant glitches and data synchronization issues that hampered workflow
• The mobile version is limited, not providing all the features that a desktop version offers

Pricing 

• Growth Plan: $29 per agent per month (billed annually)
• Pro Plan: $69 per agent per month (billed annually)
• Enterprise Plan: $109 per agent per month (billed annually)

Ratings

G2: 4.4/5 (3600+ reviews)

Help Scout - Best for startups and small businesses looking for simple customer email management software

If you are looking for straightforward customer email management software, Help Scout is a suitable option. It eliminates guesswork by providing valuable context and customer details to evaluate and improve your communications with customers. 

Help Scout unifies your customer data, email aliases, and more, making it easy to find information and track insights. It creates detailed reports to evaluate your team's effectiveness and responsiveness. Additionally, the tool automatically labels, assigns, and sorts emails, ensuring timely responses to every customer.

Key Features

• Mentions and notes: Use mentions to keep everyone informed and internal notes to jot down important information
• Saved replies: Save and reuse standard replies wherever applicable to save time

Pros 

• Live chat option reduces the client query TAT
• The number of workspaces, modifications, and feature-rich tools helps in the effective management of all inbound customer emails

Limitation 

• Lacks a dialogue box that can warn users of the result of an action while setting up a workflow 
• When we automate ticket emails, every action on a ticket (like a reply or status change) triggers the same email to be sent multiple times to everyone involved, creating unnecessary duplicates.

Pricing

• Standard Plan: $25 per user per month (billed monthly) or $22 per user per month (billed annually)
• Plus Plan: $50 per user per month (billed monthly) or $44 per user per month (billed annually)
• Pro Plan: $65 per user per month (annual billing only, for teams of 10 or more)

Ratings

G2: 4.4/5 (400+ reviews)

Zendesk - Best for all businesses, from startups and small companies to medium-sized businesses and enterprises

Zendesk’s email management software will help streamline customer support and improve customer relationships. It offers time-saving tools like AI automation and triggers to help you manage customer information like a pro. 

You’ll get powerful insights about your customers to provide personalized experiences. Zendesk’s intuitive email management platform is built to ease the lives of support agents by offering them accurate customer context on time.

Key Features

• Fast: Agents can respond to customer queries faster with ‘macros’ or pre-defined responses
• Multiple tools: Custom views, native mobile applications, built-in SLAs, and more
• Integrations: Easily integrates with platforms like Gmail, Outlook, etc.

Pros 

• Macros allow for quick ticket routing to different departments and standardized formatting for specific workflows
• Centralization of communications in one spot helps with increasing agent efficiency

Limitation

• Lacks live monitoring and coaching capabilities
• Has complex features that require IT resources for configuration and customization

Pricing

• Support Team Plan: $19 per agent/month (billed annually)
• Support Professional Plan: $55 per agent/month (billed annually)
• Support Enterprise Plan: $115 per agent/month (billed annually)
• Suite Team Plan: $55 per agent/month (billed annually)
• Suite Growth Plan: $89 per agent/month (billed annually)
• Suite Professional Plan: $115 per agent/month (billed annually)
• Suite Enterprise Plan: Pricing available upon request

Ratings

G2: 4.3/5 (5500+ reviews)

Hiver - Best for large teams that require excellent email management and collaboration features

Want to resolve queries faster and unlock efficiency? Hiver’s email management platform allows you to assign and track emails in a shared inbox. 

Keep your team in the loop with @mentions and notes. Use collision alerts to prevent duplicate responses, automatically delegate tasks via email based on a team member's skills, and track progress. 

Key Features

• SLAs: Customize SLA policies and send violation reminders when the policies are breached
• Advanced reporting: Get advanced dashboards and reports to understand issues and improve team performance
• More features: Customer satisfaction surveys, email templates, AI summarizer, and more

Pros 

• Allows multiple team members to access different inboxes so that everyone can work together rather than just having one person manage each inbox
• Classifies emails as pending or closed cases and sends reminders of emails yet to be responded to

Limitation 

• Requires agents to manually enable and disable auto-responders instead of being able to schedule them like an out-of-office reply
• Does not have different working schedules within a workgroup, making it difficult to keep KPI on reply time accurately

Pricing

• Lite Plan: $19 per user per month (billed annually)
• Pro Plan: $29 per user per month (billed annually)
• Elite Plan: $49 per user per month (billed annually)

Ratings

G2: 4.6/5 (1000+ reviews)

Zoho Desk - Best for small to medium-scale businesses 

Zoho Desk’s customer service email system allows you to send and manage emails efficiently and offer personalized experiences to customers. It empowers your agents with a centralized space to manage multiple addresses, updates, and tasks and send quick, engaging, and easy-to-follow emails. 

Track, assign, respond to, and fetch support emails and convert them into support tickets for multiple aliases, be it sales, billing, refunds, etc. Zoho Desk lets you use pre-written responses, AI assistance, automated suggestions, and keyboard shortcuts to send accurate responses quickly. 

Key Features

• Classify tickets: Classify emails based on time, status, etc., and prioritize them for issue resolution
• Personalization: Read customer details to create personalized emails for each customer and win them over
• Collaboration: Use private threads to interact with external teams and private comments for your internal communications, providing prompt customer service 
• Other features: Email tracking, automatic notifications, email templates, automatic email assignment, and customer happiness ratings

Pros 

• Organizes email by categories for easy access
• Easy integration in a few clicks with a simple code snippet

Limitation 

• The user interface could be improved based on modern design and functionality 
• Limits the functionality depth of many features when demand increases

Pricing (Source)

• Free Plan: Available 
• Express: $7 per user per month when billed annually
• Standard: $14 per user per month when billed annually
• Professional: $23 per user per month when billed annually
• Enterprise: $40 per user per month when billed annually

Ratings

G2: 4.4/5 (5600+ reviews)

How to choose the right customer service email management software?

Among many options available, choose customer service email management software that caters to your specific requirements and comes under budget. Let’s break down how you can proceed: 

Features

A customer email management platform can come with various features that may or may not fulfill your needs. So, consider your team size and evaluate your requirements. Look for must-have features like an intuitive interface, live dashboards, historical reports, chatbots, extensive analytics, automation, collaboration tools, and multiple integrations.

Ease of Use

A steep learning curve hampers quick user adoption. So, find a customer email management tool that offers a user-friendly, clean interface with easy navigation and a simple setup. This will enable agents to quickly navigate the platform and serve customers better, which is the ultimate goal. 

Platform Support

To increase and simplify user adoption, choose a platform that offers support in the form of product demos, knowledge bases, help articles, troubleshooting guides, training webinars, etc. 

Pricing 

Pricing is one of the most crucial considerations. Customer email management software generally costs between $10 and $55 per month per user. Look for the tool that offers the features you need within your budget and team size. 

Why is Plivo CX the right option for you?

All things considered, it’s evident how Plivo CX’s powerful customer service email management solution perfectly brings a combination of convenience and effectiveness to SMBs. With a low learning curve, it comes packed with useful features like AI chatbots, omnichannel support, timely and proactive updates, reporting and analytics, and more. 

If you’re an SMB looking for a perfect combination of features, efficiency and reasonable pricing, Plivo CX can be an excellent choice. 

To try it out yourself, book a demo now!

FAQs

1.What is the best customer service email management software?

After carefully evaluating all options, many consider Plivo CX to be one of the best customer service email software because of its end-to-end marketing solutions, advanced tools, and affordable pricing. This tool can help you unlock 3x more revenue and attract more customers. 

2.What features to look for in email management software for customer service?

It is recommended to find features like a comprehensive email marketing suite, intuitive automation, advanced reporting, workflow builder, high-end security, a unified interface, mentions and notes, etc. You can also look out for features like shared inbox and collaboration, omnichannel support, sending copies of emails, and more. 

3.Who uses email management software for customer service?

Startups and SMBs need email marketing software to provide effective customer service at an affordable price. Some software tools offer advanced features for large companies with large email requirements.