Did you know email is the most popular digital channel for customer service – with 62 percent of customers preferring it over 12 other options? This means one thing for sure: you can’t ignore email, despite the rising impact of other communication methods, like live chat and social media. So, how do you make sure your company uses email to its maximum potential and offers excellent customer service? 

Well, at the very least, you need customer service email management software. These solutions may include Gmail integrations, ticketing platforms, or full-blown customer experience software. They help you organize your emails and solve issues like:

• Handling a large volume of requests. Contact centers are often flooded with customer queries, and having emails organized helps streamline the workflow. Usually, this type of software automatically creates support tickets based on customer emails.

• Offering fast service. According to research, 43 percent of customers expect a one-day turnaround to their emails, while responding in just one hour will make around 89% of your customers happy. Software can help you save time and organize requests more quickly with email templates.

• Assigning requests and having an accurate view of resolved issues. An email management software will help you organize all emails in a single place or ensure that each request is handled by only one agent to avoid confusion.

So, if you’re thinking of implementing email management software for customer service, read on for some options.

8 customer service email management tools (free and premium)

1) Drag

Drag Help Desk is a tool that can “turn Gmail into a Help Desk.” It offers a shared inbox where emails from customers are automatically converted into tickets your team can work on.

Drag is free for your personal use, while it offers a 14-day free trial for business use.

What's interesting?

Drag is often compared to Trello because of the Kanban format (imagine the game solitaire). With this function, you can transform your email view into a Kanban view for better workflow management.

Drag has generally positive reviews on Capterra with its customer service and ease of use having an average 4.8 and 4.6 rating out of 5.

Its pricing is currently $99 per month for unlimited users with a discount for the annual plan.

2) Freshdesk

Freshdesk’s software solution for email management lets you organize emails in tickets and send them automatically to the right support agent based on content, language, and more. It also provides collaboration and tracking features.

Freshdesk offers a 21-day free trial.

What's interesting?

On evaluation platform G2, FreshDesk's email function is rated 9.3 out of 10.

Also, FreshDesk integrates with Acquire so you can save customer details to its CRM while taking advantage of Acquire's robust customer support platform.

3) Front

Front is a platform that facilitates email collaboration and faster response to customers. You can work on each email with your team, assign the right responder, save and send canned answers when appropriate, and keep other communications (e.g. SMS, chat) in the same place.

Front offers a 7-day free trial.

What's interesting?

Its four annual pricing plans depend on the number of team channels you want to use and features you need (you can customize your plan by paying individually for add-ons).

This software has an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2 and has earned the badge of 2020 G2 "Spring Leader" in its category.

4) Helpmonks

Helpmonks specializes in offering an effective shared inbox experience for your team. This tool allows your agents to work on emails at the same place and leave internal notes to collaborate. You can also assign emails to the right representative, set reminders, label emails, and more.

Helpmonks offers a 30-day free trial you can set up quickly.

What's interesting?

An interesting function of Helpmonks is that it lets you choose the level of control you have over your data through "multiple deployment" options, meaning it can work as a cloud platform, as a hosted version (from Helpmonks servers) and as a self-hosted edition (from your own servers).

Pricing for the hosted edition currently starts at $19 per mailbox per month.

5) Hiver

Hiver is an email management tool that offers a shared inbox with the ability to support customers via Gmail. Features include collision alerts (to ensure that only one person works on each request), delegation and collaboration capabilities, analytics, and more.

There's a free 14-day trial of Hiver you can try to see if it meets your needs.

What's interesting?

Another 2020 G2 "Spring Leader," Hiver is rated an average of 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2. It has a near-perfect score by enterprise reviewers (albeit from a small number of reviews). On Capterra, its customer service is rated 4.7 out 5.

Hiver's "Lite" pricing plan currently costs as little as $11 per user per month ($7 if you choose the annual plan). The "Elite" plan is $57 per user per month on an annual basis.

6) Keeping

Keeping integrates exclusively with your Gmail account and lets you communicate with customers more efficiently. You can organize emails under a “Help Desk” folder, assign emails directly from the Gmail account, or track multiple shared inboxes.

Keeping offers a free 30-day trial so you can test its usefulness to your team.

What's interesting?

Keeping serves mostly small- to medium-sized businesses. It has four month-to-month and four annual pricing plans to choose from, each providing access to a different number of users and mailboxes.

7) Outpost

Outpost is geared toward enhancing team collaboration regarding email. Everyone can see which emails they're assigned to and make sure customers will get their response. You can exchange internal notes, see who's working on what in real time, and build a library of templates. These tools can also automatically assign, archive, and respond to emails.

Oupost offers a free 14-day trial.

What's interesting?

According to Capterra reviews, Outpost is an affordable and easy-to-use solution. It may not be as robust as other similar software, but it performs the most basic functions well.

Outpost's pricing is currently $12.50 per user per month for the annual plan. According to their site, this flat price includes all features and unlimited users.

8) SpamTitan

SpamTitan adds an essential barrier against spam, phishing and other unwanted emails – you don’t want these clogging an inbox already full of customer requests.

This software solution offers a 30-day trial so you can determine whether it works for your business.

What's interesting?

According to most Capterra reviews, SpamTitan has a high detection rate of spam or malicious emails. On G2, it's rated 4.6 out of 5 with a 9.2 out of 10 rating for quality of support and ease of setup. SpamTitan has also earned the 2020 G2 "Spring Leader" badge.

Don’t forget omnichannel

These days, communication shouldn’t happen in silos. Customers expect consistent service across channels – and the only way to achieve this is by unifying your customer interactions under a single platform. So, if your customer service email management software is part of a robust product support platform, all the better for you and your customers.