5 Best Email Management Software for Support Teams
Any service team that works with a large volume of emails needs email management software because it ensures no customer email is missed and allows your team members to focus on providing good support (and not sorting through a cluttered inbox).
Whether in customer service or IT support, multiple agents sharing an email account like Gmail and Microsoft 365 will experience the frustration of:
- Missed emails because it’s hard to keep track of every incoming request in a shared inbox and who (if anybody) is working on the request.
- Unhappy customers because there’s no follow-up or the email response is delayed.
- Time wasted weeding through a disorganized shared inbox and moving outside of the email thread to messaging tools and CRM systems to check ticket status and confirm customer information.
- No data to better understand the problems your customers are facing, to make hiring decisions for your team, or to see how your team members are performing.
But an email management system is the next step for these customer support teams because they centralize emails and convert them into tickets for better organization, allow agents to assign themselves tickets to create a clear workflow, and let users track performance metrics so they can learn more about their agents’ workloads and their customers’ needs.
In this post, we’ll take a look at five of the top help desk tools on the market to help you decide which email management software is right for your team.
5 Best Email Support Management Software
Looking for a tool to organize your team’s emails but don’t want to overspend on a bunch of extra help desk features? Get started with our free 21-day trial to see how HelpSpot makes email management smoother and improves the support experience (for everybody involved).
HelpSpot
HelpSpot is our email management tool built specifically for teams transitioning away from basic email accounts.
It’s designed to work a lot like the email platforms your teams are already familiar with, so moving to our help desk is easy.
Plus, HelpSpot lets you link as many email accounts as you want, so you can field email requests from multiple email addresses.
Let’s take a closer look at HelpSpot’s features and how they improve email management.
Centralized Inbox & Agent Queues Organize All of Your Customer Emails
HelpSpot organizes the incoming requests from all of your linked channels in one location. That way, support requests don’t fall through the cracks and agents can easily see which requests need attention.
From the centralized inbox, agents can pick which emails to assign themselves. These customer emails then disappear from the centralized inbox and are added to the agent’s queue.
Assigning emails allows agents to:
- Eliminate confusion as to who is working on which email requests.
- Be more efficient and prioritize customer emails in their queue instead of trawling through a crowded shared inbox.
- Offer consistent and personalized customer support by ensuring all follow-up responses are with the same support agent until the request is resolved.
Collaborative Tools for a Smoother Workflow
HelpSpot provides a number of collaborative features that allow agents to communicate within each support ticket and stay on the same page in real-time.
- With internal notes, agents can message back and forth with one another on customer requests right within the ticket. HelpSpot saves the conversation history so any agent can jump in and get up to speed without asking others for status updates. Plus, you can come back and reference those notes at any point.
- Conflict detection ensures your agents aren’t stepping on each other’s toes by showing agents in real-time who else is viewing and responding to their ticket.
We also display all relevant customer information within each ticket. This eliminates the need to jump back and forth between your email management software and CRM. It also ensures that all team members are resourced with the customer context they need to provide personalized support.
With HelpSpot, you can view all past email exchanges with your customers by looking through the customer history.
Email Templates and Knowledge Base
Instead of drafting a unique email response to every customer request, you can store your team’s email templates and knowledge base articles in HelpSpot to improve response times and the consistency of email responses.
- Customizable email templates prevent agents from having to type out each and every email reply. Templates not only speed up response times and help agents field a higher number of requests, but they also help you standardize responses and eliminate spelling and grammatical errors.
- A library of knowledge base articles so they can store their in-depth troubleshooting information within HelpSpot and pull it into their email replies. These more detailed help desk articles generally provide customers with all they need and reduce follow-up customer questions.
Self-Service Portals
HelpSpot also allows you to establish a Self-Service Portal where you can publish all of your team’s troubleshooting and FAQ documentation on your website. That way, customers can access the resources they need to solve their own problem instead of waiting to hear back from your team.
In the case that your customers do need additional support from your agents, these portals also let users submit tickets right on your site.
Automation Rules and Triggers
You can also set up automation rules to train HelpSpot to do certain tasks for you. You can leverage these automation rules in whatever makes the most sense for your teams and workflows, but many teams use these rules to automate ticket routing, set reminders for SLAs, and escalate tickets if they haven’t received a reply.
Automation rules and triggers provide a lot of flexibility since they’re customizable to your needs.
Built-In Reporting Tools
HelpSpot’s built-in reporting tools let you view data and email analytics to gauge your team’s workload and performance, monitor the types of troubles your customers are experiencing, and improve your team’s customer support.
HelpSpot tracks metrics like:
- The number of replies each agent sends.
- The number of internal notes each agent sends.
- The number of tickets each agent resolves.
- Average ticket response time.
- Average ticket resolution time.
Our reporting tool is customizable, so you can track different metrics and view data over different time frames.
Integrations
Although we built our help desk with features specifically for email management, we also designed HelpSpot with a Zapier connection and open API so you can sync our software with your other tools if you want a more robust solution.
With our customization features, you can connect live chat, SMS and phone systems, bots, or social media platforms with HelpSpot and keep track of requests from those channels in one system.
Pricing & Other Perks
Most help desk brands sell their software in tiered packages to appeal to different business sizes and team needs.
And although that may seem beneficial, a lot of users have trouble finding a package that has everything that they need: A common complaint with this type of pricing set-up is that the more useful features are often tied to the more expensive plans.
So even though these brands claim to appeal to startups and small businesses, those users typically end up getting upsold out of their budget.
Alternatively, HelpSpot’s transparent pricing is simple: Everybody gets the same set of features, and you only pay for the number of seats you need. We don’t charge extra to customize our software, and support from our team is free. That way, everybody can afford to use our software (and aren’t stuck paying for a bunch of extra features).
Plus, we offer our users both cloud-based and self-hosted help desk options; teams who want to operate on a specific server or have better control over data, backups, updates, etc. can download and use our on-premise help desk.
We also provide a mobile app that works with both versions of our software to support your teams on-the-go.
HelpSpot makes email management smoother and keeps your teams organized so they can operate more efficiently. To see how HelpSpot can supplement your teams and workflows, start a free 21-day trial.
Other Email Management Software to Consider
HelpSpot is an affordable help desk specifically designed to provide the best customer support through email management.
However, if you want to shop more advanced help desk options with features beyond just email management, check out these tools below.
Zendesk
Zendesk started off as a CRM before offering a help desk for customer service teams.
Zendesk Support Suite offers a suite of highly customizable products and features that enable businesses to streamline support workflow and field requests from any channel.
Notably, one of the most expensive email management tools on the market, Zendesk funnels requests from every available channel (messaging, SMS, social media etc.) into a dynamic workspace.
From there, support teams use a variety of collaboration tools (automation, email templates, chatbots etc.) to personalize customer support.
With 1000+ pre-built software integrations, Zendesk offers the most features of any help desk on the market; however, as reported in many reviews, this is also the source of the complex functionality of the product.
For enterprises that require an advanced help desk and have the time and resources to train their team members in this software, Zendesk is a popular help desk option.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a suite of productivity tools specifically for marketing but it’s also advertised to grow customer relationships through CRM functionality, marketing automation, and email management.
Billed as a platform for marketers, Sendinblue offers customer support through features like live chat, SMS, email tracking and advanced request segmentation.
This feature uses automation to detect declared interests in a request and then matches it with customer information from the CRM to personalize customer support and save time.
While Sendinblue offers advanced help desk solutions, many reviews cite the complexity of the product and poor customer support as barriers to onboarding new agents.
However, if you can afford the time it takes to get up and running, as an advanced help desk and email marketing tool, it is one of the more affordable solutions.
ProProfs Help Desk
ProProfs Help Desk is advertised as a one-stop customer support software that can handle all internal and external requests for any size company regardless of industry.
Designed to enhance team productivity, this email management tool tracks all requests to enable faster response times.
Similar to the other help desk software in this post, ProProfs Help Desk offers a feature that keeps all customer exchanges with one support agent until it’s resolved.
Reviews say that ProProfs Help Desk has a simple interface, so it’s easy to use, but their platform isn’t very customizable since it lacks integrations. But, for the lower pricing, ProProfs Help Desk is a solid email management software for startups and small businesses.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a cloud-based help desk software that provides omnichannel customer support.
Similar to Zendesk, Freshdesk is a powerful email management software with automation, reporting, and hundreds of APIs.
And, what the reviews state that Freshdesk lacks in customization, it makes-up for with better functionality and easy onboarding of new team members.
A common complaint in the reviews is that to avail of some of the more useful email management features, Freshdesk requires you to upgrade to higher pricing tiers. This makes it an expensive email management solution for startups and small businesses.
Did You Find the Best Email Management Software for Your Team?
Each of the platforms discussed above offer email management, but to decide which is the best email management software for you, you need to identify the specific frustrations your service team is trying to overcome and consider your budget.
At HelpSpot we strive to keep things simple: Our email management system provides all the software features you need to personalize support, with none of the unnecessary features that can complicate the customer experience. If you decide later on that you need a certain feature, it can be easily integrated with HelpSpot’s open source API.
Want to try our email management software out yourself? Learn more about the ins and outs of HelpSpot and determine if it’s the right software solution for your customer service team by starting our 21-day free trial.
