Let’s explore the best customer care tools and delve into the essential details for enhancing your customer support operations. In this guide, we will provide an overview of leading software solutions, highlighting key features, starting prices, and trial information, focusing on how each tool can contribute to improving your customer care effectiveness.
1. Zendesk
Zendesk provides award-winning customer service software designed to empower businesses to deliver rapid and personalized customer support at scale. By utilizing Zendesk, companies can significantly improve their customer care by ensuring agents can seamlessly respond to customer inquiries across all channels from a unified workspace. This eliminates the inefficiency of switching between different platforms and allows for a more streamlined and effective support process.
Agents gain immediate access to crucial customer information, such as past support interactions, fostering a comprehensive 360-degree customer view through over 1,500 readily available integrations. This holistic approach ensures personalized and informed support interactions, directly enhancing customer satisfaction. Collaboration among agents and across departments is also simplified with integrations like Slack and Microsoft Teams directly within Zendesk, leading to quicker resolution times and improved teamwork in customer care.
The integration of AI within the agent workspace is a key feature for improving customer care. Zendesk’s AI assists customer service teams in managing higher volumes of tickets while maintaining excellent customer satisfaction levels. AI intelligently identifies and categorizes incoming tickets based on priority, intent, sentiment, and language, and matches them with the appropriate agent based on capacity, status, and expertise. Real-time AI guidance for agents, including ticket summaries and tone improvement suggestions, further refines communication and ensures consistently high-quality customer interactions. Built upon 18 billion real service interactions, Zendesk’s AI provides a robust foundation for personalized support from the outset, making it a powerful tool to improve customer care.
Advanced reporting and analytics offered by Zendesk are crucial for identifying areas for improvement in customer care operations. By providing insights into operational efficiencies and evolving customer needs, businesses can proactively adapt their strategies to better serve their clientele. Furthermore, enterprise-class security features ensure customer data is protected, building trust and reliability in your customer care system. Zendesk’s ease of use is paramount, maximizing agent productivity and enabling businesses to keep pace with customer expectations. It stands out as a comprehensive customer service solution that is ready to use immediately, without the need for extensive development or external consultants, offering a rapid return on investment and reduced total cost of ownership, ultimately enhancing the overall customer care experience.
Pricing: Plans start at $19 per agent/month. 14-day free trial available.
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2. Intercom
Alt text: Intercom Help Center interface, showcasing self-service options for improved customer care.
Intercom’s customer support solution is designed to enhance customer care through automation and effective messaging. Intercom Messenger complements existing support systems by providing intelligent routing, which directs customer inquiries to the most suitable agents based on their skills, availability, and the customer’s history. This targeted approach ensures efficient and expert handling of each customer issue, contributing to improved customer care.
The platform streamlines ticket management by generating tickets from Messenger and other communication channels like email, consolidating them into a shared inbox. Intercom Messenger facilitates both live chat support and self-service options, empowering customers to find solutions at their own convenience. This blend of immediate assistance and self-help resources caters to diverse customer preferences and enhances overall customer care accessibility.
Intercom’s AI tool, Fin, significantly improves customer care by offering conversational support. Fin intelligently answers frequently asked questions and provides relevant help center articles, reducing agent workload and offering instant solutions to common issues. Additionally, Fin summarizes conversations within the inbox and automatically populates ticket information, further streamlining workflows and improving agent efficiency. With over 350 integrations available in Intercom’s marketplace, businesses can customize and extend the platform to meet specific needs, enhancing customer care capabilities and integration with other business systems.
Pricing: Plans start at $39 per seat/month. 14-day free trial available.
Recommended reading: Learn about the Intercom integration for Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Intercom compare.
3. Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud is a robust customer service platform that improves customer care by providing agents with an omnichannel workspace. This unified environment allows agents to access all relevant ticket context, including customer contact details, past interactions, and purchase history, all in one place. The Swarming feature enhances collaborative customer care by enabling teams to bring in agents with specific skills into a dedicated Slack channel to collectively resolve complex cases. This collaborative approach reduces resolution times and leverages team expertise to improve customer outcomes.
Salesforce Service Cloud empowers businesses to enhance customer care through customizable workflows and automated ticket routing. By automatically directing tickets to the most appropriate support agent, the platform ensures prompt and efficient handling of customer issues. Furthermore, comprehensive reporting and analytics with prebuilt dashboards provide management with the tools to monitor team performance across different channels. These insights enable data-driven decisions to optimize workflows and improve customer care strategies. Reports can also include Swarming metrics, such as top responders and case resolution rates, offering detailed performance analysis and highlighting areas for improvement in team collaboration and efficiency.
However, it’s important to note that Salesforce can be complex, potentially requiring a longer learning curve for users, as noted in reviews highlighting user experience. Because Salesforce is not solely focused on customer experience and offers a broader suite of sales and marketing products, businesses primarily aiming to elevate their customer service may find that software specifically designed for customer experience, like Zendesk, offers a more direct and efficient path to achieving their customer care goals.
Pricing: Plans start at $25 per user/month. 30-day free trial available.
Recommended reading: Learn how Salesforce integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Salesforce compare.
4. Front
Alt text: Front shared inbox showcasing email conversation, designed to improve team-based customer care.
Front is a customer service solution focused on improving customer care by enabling users to create automated workflows and integrate multiple communication channels into a shared inbox. This centralized approach helps maintain organization and ensures no customer inquiry is overlooked. The shared inbox automatically consolidates customer inquiries from various channels and intelligently routes messages to the agent best equipped to handle them. This efficient distribution system enhances response times and agent productivity, directly improving customer care.
By logging each customer interaction, Front ensures that agents have access to complete customer history, providing essential context for future support engagements. This historical perspective enables more personalized and informed interactions, a key component of excellent customer care. Built-in collaboration features within Front facilitate team communication on tickets, streamlining internal processes and improving response quality. Unified reporting provides analytics on team performance and customer satisfaction, offering insights for continuous improvement of customer care strategies and agent effectiveness.
Businesses can further improve customer care by utilizing Front’s help center to offer self-service options. The knowledge base allows customers to find answers independently, reducing the demand on live agents for common inquiries. Administrators have control over user permissions, ensuring the quality and consistency of help center content. The integration of the help center with the live chat system provides seamless transitions between self-service and direct support, offering customers flexible options and enhancing their overall support experience.
Pricing: Plans start at $19 per seat/month. 7-day free trial available.
Recommended reading: See how Zendesk vs. Front compare.
5. Tidio
Tidio is a customer service platform specifically designed to improve customer care for small and midsize businesses. Featuring a comprehensive help desk ticketing system, Tidio enables users to effectively organize and manage customer requests within a shared inbox. The software converts emails, live chats, and social media messages into tickets that are centrally routed to the team inbox, ensuring a cohesive and streamlined approach to customer inquiry management.
Ticket customization in Tidio allows users to add specific notes and create custom tags for better organization and tracking. The system can automatically assign tickets to agents based on predefined rules and close them upon resolution, enhancing workflow efficiency and ensuring timely responses. Furthermore, Tidio automates the process of sending satisfaction surveys post-interaction, providing valuable feedback for continuous improvement of customer care practices and agent performance.
Tidio’s live chat tool is equipped with prewritten responses, which significantly speeds up agent response times to common questions, allowing for quicker and more efficient customer service. The real-time typing view in the chat window allows agents to see what customers are typing before they send the message, giving agents a head start in preparing helpful responses and improving the flow of conversation. Tidio also features Lyro, a conversational AI chatbot, which provides automated support to customers, handling routine inquiries and freeing up agents for more complex issues. This combination of live and automated support options makes Tidio a versatile tool for improving customer care efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Pricing: Plans start at $29 per month. A free plan and a 7-day trial are available.
6. Bitrix24
Alt text: Bitrix24 task list interface, illustrating task management features for better customer care operations.
Bitrix24 offers online customer support software designed to improve customer care by enabling teams to provide omnichannel support and manage customer requests from a single, unified platform. Businesses can configure the system to queue requests by channel, ensuring organized and efficient handling of inquiries from different sources. Customization options include creating prewritten responses to expedite answers to common questions and setting up wait time rules to manage customer expectations and agent workflows.
Every customer interaction across all channels is automatically logged into Bitrix24’s CRM, providing a comprehensive history and context for each customer. The system intelligently collects customer data and automatically creates a new lead profile if a customer does not already exist in the database, enriching customer relationship management and personalizing future interactions. Bitrix24 also offers both prebuilt and customizable activity reporting features, allowing businesses to monitor and analyze customer service performance and identify areas for improvement in customer care strategies.
Bitrix24’s built-in video calling feature directly enhances customer care by enabling agents and customers to connect face-to-face for issue resolution. Features like screen sharing and recording allow agents to visually demonstrate solutions, guide customers through complex steps, and record sessions for future reference or training purposes. Videoconferencing capabilities further support team collaboration, facilitating group discussions and knowledge sharing among up to 48 participants, which collectively contributes to a more informed and responsive customer care environment.
Pricing: Plans start at $49 per organization/month. A free plan and a 15-day free trial are available.
7. HappyFox
HappyFox is a customer service solution and help desk management software provider focused on improving customer care through efficient request organization and streamlined workflows. It features a robust ticketing system that helps teams manage and organize customer requests effectively, and provides a single customer view for omnichannel support, ensuring agents have a complete context of customer interactions regardless of channel. Automation capabilities, customizable workflows, and AI-powered chatbots in HappyFox help automate routine tasks, freeing up agents to focus on more complex and critical customer issues, thereby enhancing overall customer care efficiency.
Managers can utilize HappyFox to optimize work schedules, further improving customer care operations. The platform allows for defining team work hours and configuring schedules to align with service level agreements. This feature also accounts for non-working hours when calculating time-based conditions, ensuring accurate and fair workload management and consistent service delivery.
HappyFox also enhances customer care by offering self-service options like an online knowledge base, empowering customers to find answers to common questions and resolve issues independently, without needing to submit a support ticket. Customers can also track their support tickets, participate in community forums, and access help center articles and FAQs, all within a unified self-service portal. This comprehensive self-service capability improves customer autonomy and reduces the volume of routine inquiries directed to support agents, allowing for more focused and efficient customer care.
Pricing: Plans start at $29 per agent/month. A free trial is available.
Recommended reading: Learn how HappyFox Workflows integrates with Zendesk.
8. Zoho Desk
Alt text: Zoho Desk user dashboard overview, highlighting features for efficient customer care management.
Zoho Desk is a customer support software designed to improve customer care with tools and automation options that streamline agent workflows. The software offers omnichannel support through a single-view dashboard, enabling agents to manage customer issues efficiently in one centralized location. The ticket management system in Zoho Desk allows for organizing tickets by status, due date, and priority, ensuring that critical issues are addressed promptly and effectively, which is crucial for maintaining high standards of customer care.
Key features of Zoho Desk that enhance customer care include self-service resources, service level agreements (SLAs), AI capabilities, an advanced response editor, and built-in analytics. The platform enables users to track customer data and generate reports with key performance metrics, providing valuable insights into customer service operations. Customizable dashboards allow for visualizing and tracking specific ticket metrics, aiding in performance monitoring and strategic adjustments to improve customer care processes.
Zoho Desk’s AI-powered assistant, Zia, significantly contributes to improved customer care by detecting customer sentiment based on their language and intelligently routing tickets to agents with this context in mind. This sentiment analysis ensures that agents are better prepared to handle the emotional tone of the customer, leading to more empathetic and effective interactions. Additionally, Zia can auto-tag tickets and notify agents about unusual activity in the ticket workflow, further streamlining operations and enhancing agent responsiveness and efficiency, ultimately improving the customer care experience.
Pricing: Plans start at $7 per user/month. A free plan and a 15-day free trial are available.
Recommended reading: Learn how Zoho integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Zoho compare.
9. ServiceNow
ServiceNow is a cloud-based customer service tool tailored for enterprises, focused on improving customer care through self-service capabilities and workflow automation. It features a customer self-service portal that empowers users to create service requests or find solutions in help center articles without needing to interact directly with an agent. Customers can also engage in community forums to ask questions and share experiences, fostering a peer-to-peer support environment that enhances overall customer care accessibility.
Businesses can significantly improve customer care efficiency by automating workflows within ServiceNow, which helps agents manage repetitive tasks more effectively. Users can design processes to automate the identification, logging, resolution, and closure of incidents, reducing manual data entry and ensuring consistency. The platform also supports the creation of cross-enterprise workflows that provide end-to-end views of processes, streamlining complex service requests and improving overall service delivery.
ServiceNow’s customer service management (CSM) tools are enhanced with generative AI technology, further improving customer care capabilities. The Now Assist tool provides AI-powered suggestions for agent responses, helping to expedite communication and ensure consistent, high-quality interactions. Additionally, ServiceNow’s AI offers proactive suggestions to guide agents towards effective ticket resolution, streamlining the troubleshooting process and improving resolution times, which are critical components of excellent customer care.
Pricing: Contact ServiceNow
Recommended reading: See how Zendesk vs. ServiceNow compare.
10. LiveAgent
Alt text: LiveAgent ticketing system interface, designed for efficient customer care ticket management.
LiveAgent is a customer service tool that prioritizes live chat to improve customer care by offering real-time support and immediate assistance. Key features include a real-time typing view, customer service website monitoring to proactively engage visitors in chat, and customizable chat invitations based on agent availability and activity. LiveAgent’s universal inbox collects help requests from all channels and intelligently routes them to the most appropriate agents, ensuring efficient handling of all customer inquiries.
Beyond its robust chat tool, LiveAgent’s help desk includes built-in call center software with both inbound and outbound call capabilities, a comprehensive ticketing system, a knowledge base for self-service support, and reporting and analytics tools for performance monitoring. Call recording, interactive voice response (IVR) flows, and real-time activity monitoring further enhance operational efficiency and customer care quality. A callback request feature allows customers to avoid waiting on hold, preserving their place in the queue and improving their overall experience.
Users can significantly improve customer care workflows by configuring LiveAgent’s automation tools using its Rules feature. These rules automate routing, tagging, and ticket resolutions, streamlining processes and reducing manual workload for agents. LiveAgent is also highly customizable with a library of integrations to connect with various third-party tools, allowing businesses to tailor the platform to their specific needs and further enhance their customer care capabilities.
Pricing: Plans start at $9 per agent/month. A free plan and free trials of 7 or 30 days are available.
11. Freshdesk
Freshworks’ customer service product, Freshdesk, is designed to improve customer care by providing a unified platform for support teams to manage, prioritize, and respond to customer requests from a single location. Its ticketing system efficiently gathers requests from various channels into a centralized team inbox, streamlining communication and ensuring no inquiry is missed. Trend reports offer teams valuable insights into ticket activity, helping to identify patterns and areas for improvement in customer service strategies.
Users can configure ticket fields in Freshdesk to automate the routing, categorization, and prioritization of incoming requests, enhancing operational efficiency and ensuring timely responses to critical issues. The ability to create custom ticket statuses provides agents with clear visibility into the stage of each ticket, improving workflow management and team coordination. The system also intelligently detects when a customer concludes a conversation with a “Thank you,” preventing tickets from being accidentally reopened, which helps maintain accurate ticket status and reduces unnecessary agent workload.
However, it’s worth noting that the Freshworks platform is composed of three separate systems: Freshdesk, Freshchat, and Freshcaller, each operating in its own workspace. This separation requires agents to navigate between different tabs to access complete customer information, potentially slowing down customer service interactions and increasing the risk of agents missing crucial context. Businesses aiming for seamless, integrated customer care experiences may find that platforms offering a truly unified workspace, like Zendesk, provide a more efficient and streamlined solution.
Pricing: Plans start at $15 per agent/month. A free plan and a 14-day free trial are available.
Recommended reading: See how Zendesk vs. Freshdesk compare.
12. Hiver
Alt text: Hiver reporting and analytics interface, providing insights to improve customer care performance.
Hiver is a multichannel customer service help desk specifically engineered to improve customer care for businesses deeply integrated with Google Workspace. Rather than requiring a completely new platform adoption, Hiver enhances existing Google tools by adding essential customer service features directly within the Google environment. These features include shared inboxes, analytics, and service level agreements (SLAs), making it an ideal choice for companies looking to leverage their current Google infrastructure to enhance customer support.
Hiver’s shared inbox is designed to improve team collaboration and efficiency with customizable views that allow users to organize conversations using categories and filters tailored to their preferences. The Conversation ID feature enables precise tracking of email threads by assigning a unique number, making it easy to locate and revisit specific interactions on demand. Collaboration is further enhanced through notes and @mentions (tagging), allowing team members to communicate internally on customer issues without the need for forwarding emails or including external parties in internal discussions.
Additionally, Hiver allows businesses to improve customer care by creating a knowledge base to house frequently asked questions (FAQs), instructions, and troubleshooting guides. This self-service resource empowers customers to find answers independently. The knowledge base features an embedded search bar for easy navigation, and if customers cannot find the information they need, they can seamlessly submit a support ticket directly from within the knowledge base, providing a smooth transition from self-service to direct support.
Pricing: Plans start at $15 per user/month. A 7-day free trial is available.
13. ProProfs Help Desk
ProProfs Help Desk is a customer support solution designed to improve customer care by enabling teams to efficiently manage, track, and resolve support tickets. The software includes a shared inbox that facilitates team collaboration by providing agents with a unified view of all customer conversations. Agents can prioritize tickets, automate routine tasks, and tag teammates into conversations for streamlined teamwork and issue resolution.
Agents can access a customer’s complete ticket history and export conversations as PDFs for record-keeping and offline review. Private notes within the platform enable internal team communication and collaboration on tickets without customer visibility. Collision detection is a valuable feature that prevents multiple agents from unknowingly working on the same ticket simultaneously, improving efficiency and reducing redundant efforts.
ProProfs enhances customer care further by offering a knowledge base for self-service support, allowing customers to access articles and FAQs to resolve common issues independently. Its integrated live chat software enables real-time support via a web widget, providing immediate assistance when needed. ProProfs also includes surveys to help teams collect customer feedback and track customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, providing valuable data for continuous improvement of customer care strategies and service delivery.
Pricing: Plans start at $19.99 per operator a month. A free plan and a 15-day free trial are available.
Recommended reading: Recommended reading: Learn how ProProfs integrates with Zendesk.
14. Help Scout
Alt text: Help Scout shared inbox interface, focused on team collaboration for improved customer care.
Help Scout’s customer care software is designed to improve customer care by consolidating customer data, interactions, and history into a shared inbox, providing agents with comprehensive context for each customer request. This unified view empowers agents to deliver more personalized and efficient support. The shared inbox includes features like private notes for internal team communication and collision detection to prevent agents from duplicating efforts on the same customer issue, enhancing team efficiency and coordination.
Help Scout’s AI tools, including AI Summarize and AI Assist, further improve customer care capabilities. AI Summarize helps agents quickly understand the context of lengthy email threads by condensing them into concise bullet points. AI Assist provides real-time suggestions as agents compose replies, helping to improve content quality, refine tone, and even translate messages into different languages. These AI-driven features streamline agent workflows and enhance the quality and efficiency of customer communications.
Businesses can use Help Scout to administer short-form surveys and collect customer satisfaction ratings directly on their website or within their app, providing immediate feedback on customer experiences. Additionally, Help Scout offers a comprehensive apps and integrations directory with over 100 integrations for support, marketing, e-commerce, communication, CRM, and analytics, allowing businesses to extend the platform’s functionality and tailor it to their specific needs, further improving their overall customer care ecosystem.
Pricing: Plans start at $20 per user/month. A 15-day free trial is available.
Recommended reading: See how Zendesk vs. Help Scout compare.
15. HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is designed to improve customer care by offering a shared inbox that provides agents with immediate access to customer history, ticket information, and queue details. Seamlessly integrated with HubSpot’s CRM, Service Hub ensures synchronized information across HubSpot’s suite of tools, providing a holistic view of customer interactions. Agents can also utilize a mobile inbox, enabling them to stay responsive and manage customer inquiries effectively while on the move, enhancing accessibility and responsiveness.
With HubSpot Service Hub, businesses can significantly improve customer care by creating dedicated customer portals and custom feedback surveys. The customer portal empowers customers to view, open, and respond to their support tickets and access the company’s knowledge base, promoting self-service and customer autonomy. Custom feedback surveys allow businesses to gather detailed insights into customer experiences and preferences, providing valuable data for service improvement.
Users can automate follow-up responses based on survey results to gather more in-depth feedback and proactively address customer concerns, enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction. Key performance metrics, such as agent productivity, response time, and support volume, are readily available through the reporting and analytics dashboard. Each dashboard can accommodate up to 30 reports, offering comprehensive insights into customer service performance and enabling data-driven decisions to continuously improve customer care operations.
Pricing: Plans start at $18 per month for two users. A free plan is available.
Recommended reading: Learn about HubSpot for Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. HubSpot compare.
16. Kustomer
Alt text: Kustomer customer conversation interface, showing timeline view for improved customer care context.
Kustomer is a customer service platform engineered to improve customer care by helping support teams effectively manage customer interactions through a consolidated, timeline-based approach. It integrates customer data from numerous sources into a single timeline view, providing agents with a complete customer history, preferences, and interaction chronology in one conversational thread. Agents benefit from quick access to prewritten replies, suggested actions, and ticket tagging options, streamlining their workflow and enhancing response efficiency.
Kustomer’s AI tools utilize natural language processing to intelligently detect customer intent, significantly improving customer care personalization and responsiveness. The AI analyzes conversations and tracks customer sentiment, allowing businesses to identify both satisfied and dissatisfied customers and proactively address concerns. Support teams can also leverage Kustomer’s AI to classify and route conversations based on historical customer data, ensuring that inquiries are directed to the most appropriate agents for efficient resolution.
The platform includes live reporting and analytics dashboards that display real-time customer service metrics, providing immediate insights into operational performance and customer satisfaction levels. Kustomer retains data for reporting for up to two years, offering a substantial historical perspective. Users have the flexibility to perform one-time data exports or schedule regular report exports, enabling in-depth analysis and long-term strategic planning for continuous improvement of customer care strategies.
Pricing: Plans start at $89 per user/month.
Recommended reading: See how Zendesk vs. Kustomer compare.
17. Gorgias
Gorgias is a customer service software solution specifically designed to improve customer care for e-commerce businesses. It offers a help desk with a shared inbox system that enables support teams to collaboratively manage customer queries efficiently. Gorgias integrates seamlessly with e-commerce platforms like Shopify, allowing agents to access crucial customer details directly, including customer data, order information, and order history. This deep integration ensures that agents have all necessary context at their fingertips for personalized and effective customer interactions.
The software provides robust automation features, such as AI-powered responses, prewritten replies for frequently asked questions, and customizable templates to handle repetitive inquiries. AI intelligently scans incoming tickets to identify customer intent, automatically closing spam messages and efficiently answering legitimate requests, such as order status inquiries. These automation capabilities significantly reduce agent workload and speed up response times, enhancing overall customer care efficiency.
Gorgias features a customizable interface that allows businesses to build tailored workflows for automatically assigning, tagging, and closing tickets, streamlining operations and ensuring consistent service delivery. Prewritten responses enable agents to provide standardized answers to common questions quickly, while customizable rules allow businesses to identify and prioritize VIP customers, ensuring their requests are handled with special attention. These features collectively contribute to a more responsive, efficient, and personalized customer care experience.
Pricing: Plans start at $10 per month. A free trial is available.
Recommended reading: See how Zendesk vs. Gorgias compare.
