Want to jump straight to the answer? The best customer service software for most people is Freshdesk or LiveAgent.
Customer service software puts your support teams in the best position possible to deliver a five-star experience. Agents will have an easier time staying organized, finding information to answer questions, and following up on promises they make.
Customers get faster response times, automated answers to common questions, and a lot fewer dropped calls. Support your agents and take care of your customers using one of my top recommendations.
The 8 Best Customer Service Software of 2022
- Freshdesk — Best customer service software for keeping costs low
- LiveAgent — Best customer service software for live chat support
- HubSpot — Best free customer service software
- Gorgias — Best integrations with ecommerce platforms
- Zoho Desk — Best customer service software for ticketing
- Zendesk — Best customer service software with support suite options available
- Groove — Best customer service software for small teams and startups
- Help Scout — Best customer service software for nonprofits
In the next section are in-depth reviews of each customer service software I’m recommending. You’ll learn about the top features, benefits, use cases, pricing, and more.
Most of these vendors will let you try the software for free, and several of my recommendations actually offer free forever versions of their customer service software.
You can’t really know how the software will perform until you see it in action–follow the links to get your free trial, freemium service, or demo.
Best Customer Service Software Reviews
Freshdesk – The Best for Keeping Costs Low
- Free 21-day trial
- Plans start at $15/mo
- Extensive list of features
- Trusted by 150,000+ businesses
Freshdesk is another one of the most popular help desk solutions on the market today. Why? Because it has everything you need for modern customer service teams at an exceptionally low price.
You can try the full platform free for 21 days with as many agents as you like. No credit card necessary. If you like it, agent pricing starts at $15 per month, or you can keep using a limited version of Freshdesk free forever.
That’s right, a free forever customer service plan with unlimited agents. There are some features worth upgrading for, but you get the ability to track incoming tickets from email and social media.
For the small business that needs a better way to respond to incoming questions, Freshdesk is everything you need at no cost.
When you are ready to upgrade, Freshdesk offers several plans at competitive prices. Choose the channels you want to communicate, the type of support you want to provide, and design workflows that make sense for your line of business.
You won’t have to try and fit your customer service experience into a rigid template if you go with Freshdesk.
They offer a number of very useful features:
- Ticketing
- Collaboration
- Field service
- Automation
- Customer self-service
- Reporting
- Multi-channel support
This is great if you want to streamline your customer service solutions on a single platform. As such, Freshdesk makes team collaboration and automation a breeze.
If you’re currently using another help desk solution and you’re unhappy with it, Freshdesk makes it easy for you to switch to its software. Their team will help you make the switch over easily.
And with Freshworks Academy, their in-house training service, you’ll be able to train any member of your team to nail the Freshworks system in no time.
Here’s an overview of the plans and pricing. All rates are based on an annual plan. The prices are a bit higher if you go month-to-month.
Free
- Unlimited agents
- Email ticketing
- Team collaboration
- Knowledge base
- Ticket trend reports
Growth — $15 per month per agent
- Automations
- Collision detection
- Marketplace apps
- Helpdesk
- SLA management
- Business hours
Pro — $49 per month per agent
- Automated ticket assignment
- Custom agent roles
- Custom portal
- Enterprise reporting
- Multiple time zones and SLAs
Enterprise — $79 per month per agent
- Ticket assignment based on skills
- Create a testing environment without affecting agents or customers
- IP Whitelisting
- HIPAA compliant
- Extendable API rate limit
Omnichannel pricing (which includes phone and messaging chanels) starts at $29 per month per agent. It’s definitely cheaper to stick with fewer channels, but this is an exceptionally low price for omnichannel support.
Freshdesk integrates with hundreds of the most popular business software brands, so it will likely dovetail right into your system without a lot of costly set up.
Try the full Freshdesk platform free with a 21-day trial.
LiveAgent – The Best for Live Chat Support
- 100% free forever plan
- Upgrades starting at $15/mo
- All-in-one solution
- Simple and flexible tools
LiveAgent helps you manage all customer requests from multiple channels in a single platform.
Merge all communication and support to one place—no matter where your customers are.
LiveAgent saves you time, simplifies the process, and allows you to increase the profitability of your support team.
LiveAgent has tools for:
- Email ticketing
- Live chat
- Voice and video calls
- Social media integration
It’s built for the modern customer service team. Your employees only have to navigate a single interface in order to be present for customers on any channel you need.
With LiveAgent, the entire customer conversation is right in front of your agents–even if it began with a chat, switched to email, and then to phone.
Customers don’t have to repeat information, and the agent isn’t scrambling to find information. It’s just a better experience for everyone.
Here’s a closer look at the plans and prices for LiveAgent’s customer service software:
Free — $0 forever
- 7 day ticket history
- 1 email address for ticketing
- 1 live chat button
- 1 phone number for call center support
Ticket — $15 per month per agent
- Unlimited ticket history
- Unlimited email ticketing
- Load data from your CRM
- Multi-brand support
Ticket + Chat — $29 per month per agent
- Unlimited live chat
- Real-time visitor monitor
- Chat invitations
- Chat satisfaction surveys
All-inclusive — $39 per month per agent
- Unlimited call center support
- Video calling
- Gamification
- Unlimited call storage
For all of the paid plans, LiveAgent has add-on pricing for features like social media integration, time tracking, audit logs, and more.
Overall, it’s a simple and flexible tool for managing live customers with ticketing and live chat. Try it for free.
HubSpot – The Best Free Customer Service Software
- 100% free forever plan
- Advanced features start at $40/mo
- Wide range of solutions
- Free software for customer service
HubSpot offers some of the greatest tools on the internet for connecting with customers and nurturing relationships. They are better known for marketing and sales, but their customer service software is exceptional as well.
The best part for small businesses is that you can use HubSpot’s customer service software for free. They also offer freemium software for sales, marketing, and the best free CRM on the market.
Free features for HubSpot’s customer service software include:
- Ticketing
- Live chat
- Chatbots
- Team email
- Conversations inbox
- email templates
- Closed ticket reports
- Time-to-close reports.
HubSpot is proof that you don’t need to spend a ton of money on improving your customer service with software. After all, this won’t cost you a thing.
Upgrading to a premium plan, known as HubSpot Service Hub, gives you a lot more tools for building out and automating workflows. You certainly don’t need to be a developer to create exactly what you need.
For those of you who want access to advanced features and benefits, here’s an overview of the paid plans:
Starter — $45 per month
- Includes two paid users
- Canned snippets
- Meeting scheduling
- Agent productivity reports
- Calling
Professional — $360 per month
- Includes five paid users
- Ticket status, routing, automation, and pipelines
- Knowledge base
- 1:1 video creation
- Custom reporting
- Surveys for NPS, experience, and support
Enterprise — $1,200 per month
- Includes ten paid users
- Playbooks and goals
- Hierarchical teams
- User roles
- Single sign-on
- Integrates with Slack
All rates are based on an annual contract. You can get the HubSpot Service Hub month-to-month for 20% more.
HubSpot also offers exceptional product bundles for all CRM categories in a single solution. So if you want to get software for service, sales, and marketing from a single provider, HubSpot is the best option for you. Bundles start at $112.50 per month. Try it for free.
Gorgias – The Best Integrations with Ecommerce Platforms
- Plans start at $50/month
- Integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, & more
- Clean, appealing interface
- Ecommerce-boosting tools
In ecommerce, the overlap between customer service and sales presents opportunities to create new, loyal customers. Gorgias offers an array of tools to help you maximize those opportunities.
One of the key ways Gorgias does this is through simple integration with three of the most popular ecommerce platforms out there: Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce.
In all three cases, Gorgias pulls customer data, interactions, and order histories from the platform to give you a full view of your performance with customers.
Agents working in Gorgias will be able to update customer orders, addresses, and issue refunds without having to log into Shopify separately, for example.
This reduces the chance that you’re making redundant contact with buyers, allows you to heavily personalize content, helps you set routine customer service tasks (like common questions or requests) on autopilot, and unlocks new customer insights through powerful machine learning.
Beyond that, Gorgias offers a fantastically clean interface for your customer service reps to organize, address, and follow up on tickets. It centralizes communication across channels like SMS, social media, live chat, and email.
The omnichannel capability of Gorgias allows your team to engage with customers as they interact with ads, social posts, and other material before they even arrive at your website. So your customer service team is already warming up customers before they’ve even added anything to their cart.
Pricing for Gorgias is a bit steeper than other options on this list, but each tier allows for unlimited users and contains generous feature sets.
Basic — $60 per month
- Includes 350 tickets/month ($25 add-on for an additional 100)
- Unlimited users
- Live chat and chat campaigns
- Up to 150 integrations, including Shopify, BigCommerce, and social media platforms
Pro — $300 per month
- Includes 2,000 tickets/month ($23 add-on for an additional 100)
- Everything in Basic, plus
- Onboarding assistance
- Customer surveys
- Chat campaigns
- Set user permissions
- Magento integration
Advanced — $750 per month
- Includes 5,000 tickets/month ($21 add-on for an additional 100)
- Everything in Pro, plus
- Fully managed onboarding
- Revenue metrics
- Team management tools
- View sharing
- A dedicated Customer Success Manager
These rates can be reduced by paying annually. That brings the Basic plan down to $50/month, the Pro plan down to $250/month, and the Advanced package down to $625/month.
There is also a custom enterprise tier that can be arranged through consultation with Gorgias.
If your ecommerce business knows it’s leaving sales opportunities on the floor, give Gorgias a try through its seven-day free trial or by setting up a live demo.
Zoho Desk – The Best for Ticketing
- Free forever plan
- Upgrade starting at $12/mo
- Email ticketing & help center
- Mobile app access
Zoho is one of the most popular names in the world of business software and CRM. They offer tools for sales, marketing, email, collaboration, finance, accounting, human resources, and business intelligence.
But one of the best solutions that they offer is Zoho Desk—IT and help desk software. You can set up a ticketing system that spans whatever channels you use–phone, chat, social, email, and more.
You’ll also be able to route tickets between departments quite easily. Whether your company has multiple brands under one roof, or different tiers of customer support, you’ll be able to set up efficient workflows.
All of this saves your customers time and improves their experience. They get in touch with the right person and receive relevant assistance. They could reach out by email and call back–your service agents will see the whole interaction.
Zoho Desk has solutions for customer service agents, managers, and customers. But above all, it’s arguably the best customer service software for managing and closing tickets.
Let’s take a closer look at the plans and price points for Zoho Desk:
Free — $0
- Up to three agents
- Email ticketing
- Help center
- Private knowledge base
- Predefined SLAs
- Mobile app
- Multilingual help desk
Standard — $12 per month per agent
- Social and community channels
- Product-based ticket management
- Public knowledge base
- Escalations
- Workflow and assignment rules
- Supervise rules
- Customer happiness ratings
Professional — $20 per month per agent
- Multi-department ticketing
- Team management
- Telephony
- Automated time tracking
- Ticket templates
- Ticket sharing
- Mobile SDK
Enterprise — $35 per month per agent
- Live chat
- AI
- Customize help center
- Advanced process management
- Scheduled reports
- Validation rules
- Role-based data sharing
No matter how big, small, or complex your business is, Zoho Desk has a plan for you. Try it for free.
Zendesk – The Best Software with Support Suite Options
- Free trial available
- Starts at $89/mo
- Flexible customized solutions
- Used by 150,000+ businesses
Zendesk is one of the best overall customer service software solutions on the market today. It’s used by 150,000+ businesses, including big brands like Uber, Venmo, Shopify, and Slack.
They’ll give you all the tools you need to manage omnichannel customer service. You can provide customer support via email, live chat, voice, Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, WhatsApp, and more.
The software makes it possible to connect all of your data sources to a single location. So when a customer contacts you for support, the right information will automatically be on display.
Zendesk is flexible, so it can support the needs of any business. You can get a customized solution that fits with your existing support environment.
Here’s a quick overview of the plans, features, and pricing for the Zendesk support suite:
Professional Support Suite — $89 per agent per month
- Omnichannel support
- Social messaging add-on
- Self-service knowledge base
- Dashboards and reporting for all channels
- Talk partner edition
- Multiple ticket forms
Enterprise Support Suite — $149 per agent per month
- Roles and permissions with skilled base routing
- Multi-brand support
- Chat widget and web SDK
- Content cues to identify knowledge gaps
- 24/7 live chat and phone support
The full-service support suite from Zendesk has it all. But not every business needs something this comprehensive. If you’re looking for something a little bit more basic, Zendesk offers more affordable options for smaller businesses.
- Essential — $5 per month per agent
- Team — $19 per month per agent
- Professional — $49 per month per agent
- Enterprise — $99 per month per agent
- Elite — $199 per month per agent
You can try any Zendesk software or support suite with a free trial. If you’re looking for a customized solution, contact the Zendesk sales team.
Groove The Best for Small Teams and Startups
- Plans start at $9/month
- Team collaboration tools
- Customizable knowledge base
- Exceptional automation tools
Groove isn’t as popular and well-known as some of the other options on our list.
If your company has outgrown email for customer support and you’re getting inquiries on multiple channels, Groove will be a top choice for you to consider.
Where they really shine is their team collaboration tools. You can add internal private notes to discussions, quickly mention teammates to bring them in the loop, and assign specific tasks to members of the team.
The “shared inbox” for teams is a big step up from basic email. Think of how many clicks per day you can eliminate when assigning someone to a ticket is next to the reply button on any email?
Groove has exceptional automations to streamline your customer support. Set rules, tagging, canned replies, and custom folders with your preferences to eliminate busywork.
Another standout feature from Groove is the ability to customize your knowledge base. This is crucial for businesses that want to offer customer self-service tools.
The knowledge base themes are fully customizable, beautifully designed, and mobile responsive. Plans and pricing for Groove customer support software are as follows:
Starter — $9 per month per user
- One mailbox
- Knowledge base
- Live chat
- Web widget
- Assignments and mentions
Plus — $19 per month per user
- 5 mailboxes
- Full history of reports
- Rules
- API access
- 40+ integrations
Pro — $29 per month per user
- 25 mailboxes
- Teams
- WhatsApp and SMS
- Integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Jira
Company — Custom pricing
- Unlimited mailboxes
- Priority support
- Dedicated customer support manager
- SSO/SAML
- Enterprise-level security
I’d recommend Groove for small teams and startups. In fact, they have a special startup rate for businesses with less than ten employees. Eligible businesses can get a 93% discount off of the Pro plan.
Help Scout – The Best for Nonprofits
- Plans start at $20/month
- Certified B corporation
- High-quality software
- Used by 10,000+ businesses
Help Scout offers a high-quality software for customer service.
It’s unique because it’s a Certified B corporation. They strive to make a positive impact on the environment and communities. So they go the extra mile to support organizations that share the same values.
If you have a nonprofit that supports human rights, environmental sustainability, or underrepresentation in tech, Help Scout will provide a significant discount on your customer service software.
Some of you might even be eligible for discounts of up to 100%. That’s right—free.
Even if you don’t fall into one of those categories, Help Scout is still a top solution for customer service.
Set up shared inboxes for your team and make it easy to collaborate. Give your customers the ability to send you an email if your team isn’t able to respond quick enough to incoming chat requests
The interface is very welcoming. This is not a tool you are going to have to spend tons of time training people how to use.
Here’s a closer look at the plans and prices:
Standard — $20 per month per user
- Three mail boxes
- Beacon with live chat
- Messages for up to 10,000 customers
- Reports
- Automated workflows
- 50+ integrations
Plus — $35 per month per user
- 10 mailboxes
- Custom fields and teams
- Salesforce, HubSpot, and Jira apps
- HIPAA compliance
- SSO/SAML authentication
Company — Custom pricing
- Unlimited mailboxes and docs sites
- Flexible users
- Concierge onboarding
- Dedicated account manager
- Enterprise-grade security
These rates are based on an annual contract. Month-to-month plans are available for an additional fee. You can try Help Scout for free with a 15-day trial.
How to Choose the Best Customer Service Software For Your Business
There are certain features and considerations to keep in mind as you’re evaluating different options.
This is the methodology that we use and recommend here at Quick Sprout.
Number of Agents
Companies with five service reps won’t need the same software as a business with 50 agents.
That’s why your customer service team’s size is crucial to your ultimate choice.
Larger teams need features for things like collaboration and role-based ticketing, but that won’t be necessary for a smaller business.
Communication Channels
What’s the ideal way (or ways) for customers to get in touch with your company? Good customer service software will support a range of channels, including:
- Phone
- Live chat
- Chatbots
- Support tickets
- Social media
Adding more channels gives customers more options, but it also makes more work for your company on the backend. This is why it’s important to find customer service software that brings all these channels together.
A tool like Live Agent, allows an employee to see a single history of customer interactions across all channels. A person could reach out on Facebook, get help via email, and call back months later–your customer service rep sees the entire story.
You can imagine how jumbled it would be if you are offering multi-channel service without giving employees a single dashboard to manage it.
Feature Bundles
Every customer service software on our list does an exceptional job of marketing its top features. But with that said, you should only focus on the features you need the most.
For example, are you looking for customer service software specifically for live chat? LiveAgent will be a top choice for you. If you want a solution for your field service agents, use Salesforce Service Cloud. There are even tools for customer service, sales, and marketing CRM built into single product bundles.
My suggestion is this. Identify the features you definitely need. Then look for the right plan that has all of those features.
Price
The price for customer service software varies on a wide range of factors. Lots of solutions charge you based on the number of customer service agents on your team.
Available features in your package will also have a significant impact on what you pay.
Customer service is definitely not something you should skimp on. It’s ok to spend money. But with that said, not all of you need to go overboard. Small businesses, startups, and nonprofits with smaller teams can use free customer service software without compromising quality.
The Top Customer Service Software in Summary
Happy customers come back and spend more money. Unsatisfied customers can cause significant damage to your reputation. That’s why you should rely on the best customer service software like LiveAgent, HubSpot, and Freshdesk.
Every business needs to prioritize customer service. To deliver flawless service and maintain happy customers, you can leverage the power of software to automate and streamline your system.
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