Customer service software that works inside your inbox!

Hiver is a customer service platform that combines ease of use with powerful functionalities. It empowers your support team to assist customers across multiple channels—email, chat (think live chat and chatbots), knowledge base, phone, and even WhatsApp. You also have the option to create a knowledge base.

Unlike other conventional support platforms which are complicated to setup and use, you can get up and running with Hiver in about 15 minutes.

Some of its other notable features include shared-inboxes for managing customer emails across your team, rules-based automations to route and tag tickets, and an analytics dashboard that helps monitor team performance and support quality.

Noteworthy features:


• Live chat integration for real-time engagement with website visitors
• Knowledge base for customer self-service
• AI Summarizer to condense email threads for quick context
• SLA detection to track compliance and manage customer expectations

Kustomer is a one-stop omnichannel help desk solution for large teams looking to integrate CRM and ticketing functionalities – powered by AI – into a single tool. Its unified timeline view offers insight into every customer’s journey, allowing agents to deliver more contextualized and personalized support.

While Kustomer is an excellent choice for a robust help desk, many users find its interface less intuitive.

Noteworthy features:


• Omnichannel support
• AI-powered automation
• Customer timeline

If you run an e-commerce business, Gorgias is probably the first help desk ticketing software you might want to check out. It provides a unified inbox to manage customer inquiries from different channels — phone, email, live chat, and web forms.

The reason why so many e-commerce companies love Gorgias is because it offers robust integrations with platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. These integrations enable support teams to do more than just resolve customer tickets – they can view order details, issue refunds, and even manage subscriptions from a single platform.

Considering the fact that Gorgias is more tailored to ecommerce companies, businesses in other niches might not find its features very useful.

Noteworthy features:


• Unified inbox
• E-commerce integrations
• Automation

Zendesk is a robust help desk that is known for its extensive feature set. It works by centralizing customer tickets from multiple channels into a single dashboard. Every incoming ticket is assigned a unique ID which helps in tracking status.

The platform’s AI capabilities are quite notable – it routes tickets based on intent, language and sentiment. Additionally, when support staff interact with customers, the AI offers suggestions on what response to send.

While the platform’s versatility is impressive, configuring and navigating Zendesk can be challenging, particularly for first-time users. The learning curve can feel steep, and Zendesk’s pricing isn’t the most budget-friendly either, especially for smaller businesses or those eyeing its advanced features. Consider Zendesk only if you don’t mind the initial setup grind (or the hefty price tag).

Noteworthy features:


• Omnichannel support
• Reporting and analytics
• AI-powered automation

Help Scout is a popular help desk software more suited for small businesses. It offers email, chat, and knowledge base capabilities within a user-friendly interface.

Its embeddable widget, Beacon, allows you to integrate a contact form, chat box, and self service support right into your website or app. Some of its notable AI features include AI Drafts (to offer suggestions based on past conversations), AI Summarize (to give you a gist of conversations),and AI Assist (to improve your customer communication with tone, grammar and language suggestions).

While Help Scout is a solid option in the help desk market, some users report that its reporting features fall short.

Noteworthy features:


• Shared inbox
• Knowledge base (Docs)
• Live chat (Beacon)

Freshdesk is a cloud-based help desk platform developed by Freshworks. It streamlines customer communication by consolidating interactions from email, phone, chat, social, and messaging apps into a unified system.

The platform offers a robust ticketing system to help streamline agent workflows and ensure every ticket can be tracked till resolution. It also comes with handy collaboration features that allow teams across the organization (and even outside) to work together on customer responses, and a self-service portal that gives customers and support agents access to helpful how-to guides and troubleshooting articles.

AI Freddy helps improve agent productivity by automating repetitive tasks, summarizing issues, offering conversation suggestions, and anticipating issues before they arise. Its vast feature set, however, can be overwhelming for new users.

Noteworthy features:


• Omnichannel support
• Ticketing system
• Helpdesk AI (Freddy)

Front is a collaborative help desk that empowers support teams to connect with their customers across email, live chat, social media messages, and text – all from a single inbox. One of the best features of the tool is that it combines the comfort and familiarity of a traditional inbox with the powerful capabilities of a help desk.

The tool fosters real-time internal collaboration via features like in-thread comments and shared drafts. It comes with a host of AI capabilities like AI Compose for drafting emails, AI Summarize for customer query summaries, and AI Answers for 24/7 chat support, enabling businesses to deliver efficient, prompt assistance.

The tool also integrates with third-party CRMs and project management tools to offer teams an integrated view of the customer’s journey.

Noteworthy features:


• Omnichannel communication
• AI-powered tools
• Automation

Zoho Desk (part of the Zoho suite) is a cloud-based ticketing system designed to streamline customer support for organizations of all sizes. The tool offers automation capabilities for support teams to manage repetitive tasks, a customizable knowledge base for customers and employees to self-serve, and a comprehensive reporting dashboard to monitor key support metrics.

Some of its notable AI features include Answer Bot (to share information from your knowledge base with customers and employees),  Auto-Tagging (to automatically tag tickets based on its content), Anomaly Detection (to alert you of unusual activities in your ticket streams) and Field Predictions (to automate ticket assignments).

If you’re using other tools from Zoho Office Suite, integrating Zoho Desk with them can streamline your customer service considerably.

Noteworthy features:


• Multichannel support capabilities
• Automation
• AI-powered assistant (Zia)

HappyFox is an easy-to-use help desk designed to consolidate support processes. It brings together customer interactions across multiple channels—email, live chat, social media, and phone—under one dashboard.

The tool offers some unique features like allowing you to break down the ticket resolution process into easily-trackable tasks (including pinning tasks/tickets that need attention),applying bulk actions – changing status or adding tags – to similar tickets, and canned actions that help you send auto-responses based on the type of customer queries.

Though HappyFox comes with the functionalities of most cutting-edge modern ticketing systems, some users report that the initial setup can be complex.

Noteworthy features:


• Omnichannel support
• Canned actions
• Task management

Atlassian’s integrated service management product, Jira Service Management, is designed to help IT, development, customer service and operations teams resolve issues quickly yet efficiently.

Its features include request management, which simplifies the handling, tracking, and resolution of support requests. Incident management focuses on quickly restoring operations after issues arise. Problem management helps identify root causes and document workarounds to prevent recurring problems. Change management ensures that system and process changes are implemented smoothly with minimal disruptions. Additionally, configuration management maintains detailed records of IT systems and processes to enhance oversight and control.

The tool also offers a customizable help center for customers to raise requests and access useful resources, rich customer context for agents to tailor their communication and SLAs to prioritize and act on issues.

Noteworthy features:


• Request management
• Incident management
• Problem management

Jitbit is a help desk ideal for organizations that want to provide multi-channel support. The tool provides options to assist customers via live chat, chatbots, a knowledge base, and email (supporting multiple email protocols such as IMAP, POP3, and SMTP and in-built spam protection).

It covers all the basics—a shared inbox, customizable workflows, and reporting –while offering advanced AI-powered features that enable you to draft quick responses to your customers. They also claim that its cloud-hosted help desk takes about 30 seconds to set up.

What stands out about Jitbit is that it provides two types of software to cater to your needs: a cloud-based system for easy, on-the-go use, and a self-hosted system for corporations with strict security policies.

Noteworthy features:


• Multi-channel support
• Automation and macros
• Flexible deployment

Groove is an easy-to-use help desk designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It provides features like shared inbox, live chat, social media messaging, and knowledge base. The best part about Groove is that it’s a no-frills, user-friendly tool that many teams love!

Groove helps you streamline your workflows with automation. It provides features like rule-based task management, round-robin case assignments, and reporting dashboards. Teams can even leverage its AI capabilities to summarize tickets and get help in writing responses. They can also conveniently handle tickets with the ‘all inboxes view’ feature – one consolidated mailbox for all customer interactions.

Despite all this, Groove’s users raise concerns about not being able to reply to older messages in a conversation thread.

Noteworthy features:


• Shared inbox and live chat
• Automation and workflows
• AI assistance

Spiceworks is an IT management platform that helps with network monitoring, asset management, and help desk operations. It’s a great tool for small IT teams tackling internal requests because it’s completely free.

The interface is simple and plain, but it has everything a typical help desk has to offer: ticketing, customer portal, knowledge base, basic workflows, canned responses, reporting dashboards and SLA monitoring. The tool also lets you create a customized user portal where users can themselves submit and track their requests. It also comes with a mobile app that allows teams to manage service requests on-the-go.

Do keep in mind that Spiceworks throws up in-app ads as a way to keep the service free, and if you can live with that, then it’s a help desk tool worth considering.

Noteworthy features:


• Ticketing management
• Customizable ticket attributes
• Workflow automation

Helpcrunch is a customer service software that helps you connect with your customers across multiple channels. The platform’s team inbox feature consolidates messages from chat, email, and social media into a single unified system so that nothing gets silo-ed.

Aside from this, HelpCrunch covers all the other basics you’d expect from a good help desk platform—a customizable and AI-powered knowledge base (with translation functionality in its Pro plan),AI-powered chatbots, automation workflows, pre-built templates, and reporting tools. Its AI Editor also helps teams craft and refine their customer communication by assisting them with rephrasing, grammar correction, tone adjustment, and translation.

One thing to note: if you’re looking for a helpdesk solution that is more focused on email support, HelpCrunch may not be the best solution for you, as it's more focused on chat.

Noteworthy features:


• Live chat
• AI-powered editor
• Knowledge base

If your business is looking for a chat tool that has very powerful AI features, Intercom should be on your list. Known for its real-time messaging capabilities, Intercom helps you reach out to and assist your customers proactively – both on your website and on your mobile app.

The one feature its users rave about is called Fin AI Agent. Fin accesses and collates information from all your resources to deliver precise answers, offers multilingual support in over 45 languages, and personalizes communication for customers across channels. It also provides key insights into agent performance while suggesting actions to consistently improve your support quality. Intercom claims to offer a 99.9% accuracy rate and an 82% resolution rate for support queries using Fin.

Despite its cutting-edge capabilities, Intercom can get extremely pricey for companies with constrained budgets. Check out this Reddit thread on how a company’s Intercom billing shot up by 120% due to the AI chatbot.

Noteworthy features:


• Unified inbox
• Fin AI Agent
• AI-powered automation

As the name suggests, LiveChat is a live chat and ticketing system that helps your business offer customer support on the website. The tool offers an option where you can get a preview of how the chat widget will appear on your homepage.

The software is known for several unique features; chat tags help track conversations effectively and chat transfer allows more experienced agents to take over chats when needed. Additionally, it provides seamless integrations across multiple messaging channels to help teams build a consolidated view of customer data.

If you’re particular about how you want your chat widget to look, there’s an option to customize it. The tool’s AI Copilot equips support agents with response suggestions, while chat summaries offer a quick overview of what’s being discussed. Tag suggestions and spelling checks further assist agents in delivering faster and smarter support.

Noteworthy features:


• Real-time chat
• Messaging sneak-peek
• AI Copilot

Tidio is a customer service software that integrates live chat, AI-powered chatbots, and other support channels into a single interface.

One of its key features is a visual automation builder that lets you create workflows without any code. You can design what journeys customers take when they ask specific questions. If you want to respond faster to queries, tap into Tidio’s AI Reply Assistant – it uses GPT-4 technology to offer suggestions to support staff.

There’s also the Lyro Chatbot which uses your existing support-related resources to deliver accurate, context-aware responses. This bot, in particular, claims to handle up to 70% of typical customer queries, allowing support teams to focus on the more critical and complex tasks.

Noteworthy features:


• Live chat
• Lyro AI Chatbot
• Tidio AI reply assistant

LiveAgent started out as a chat product to help businesses interact with customers in real-time. Over the years, they’ve added more features to become a fully-fledged helpdesk. The product currently supports over 40 languages and is excellent for businesses that have a customer base spanning multiple countries.

The tool offers proactive chat invitations, helping you engage customers at the right time on the right webpage. For instance, if a customer is spending too much time on the checkout page, you can proactively start a chat asking if they’re facing any issues making the payment.

When conversing with customers, you can make use of canned responses to answer commonly asked questions. It’s quite the time saver. There’s also a really cool real-time typing view feature that allows support staff to see what customers input as they type. It helps you be more prepared. LiveAgent integrates with various CRM tools (such as Salesforce or Pipedrive),e-commerce platforms (like Shopify or WordPress) ,VoIP solutions, and social media channels (such as Facebook or Twitter).

Noteworthy features:


• Live chat
• Proactive chat invitations
• Real-time typing view

Are you a small business that aims to provide stellar support? You might want to check out Tawk.to – a free live chat solution.

The tool allows businesses to track and interact with website visitors in real-time. It has several compelling features such as real-time visitor monitoring, proactive chat triggers, customizable widgets, canned responses and a built-in ticketing system for unlimited agents–all at no cost.

At the same time, Tawk.io has certain limitations. The tool offers limited customization options for the chat widget design, and some advanced features, like white labeling, require a paid upgrade.

Noteworthy features:


• Real-time visitor monitoring
• Customizable chat widgets
• Ticketing system

Salesforce Service Cloud stands as a powerhouse in customer service solutions, unifying support operations across email, phone, chat, and social media channels. Through its consolidated console, support teams gain instant access to contextual customer data, enabling personalized service delivery at scale.

The platform’s AI capabilities transform everyday support operations. Einstein Bots handle routine inquiries automatically, while AI-powered Service Replies generate contextual responses for messaging channels. Taking automation further, Service Planner leverages generative AI to optimize support workflows, boost agent efficiency, and maintain compliance standards.

Other important features of the tool include case management for tracking issues and a knowledge base that empowers agents and customers with self-service capabilities.The platform seamlessly integrates with other tools in the Salesforce suite, so if you have them in your tech stack, you can collaborate better cross-functionally.

Noteworthy features:


• Omni-channel routing
• Einstein AI and analytics
• Customer service AI