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8 Best AI Email Management Tools in 2024

Nov 08, 2024
    |    
11 min read
    |    

Table of contents

In today’s world, we are constantly bombarded with emails. It can be difficult to keep track of all of our messages, let alone prioritize them and respond to them in a timely manner. This is where AI email management tools come in.

AI email management tools use artificial intelligence to automate tasks such as sorting emails, prioritizing messages, and drafting responses. This can free up your time, helping you focus on the most important tasks.

There are a number of AI email management tools available in the market. In this blog post, we will review eight of the best options. We will discuss their features, pricing, and pros and cons.

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Table of Contents

What is AI Email Management Software?

An AI Email Management Software uses artificial intelligence to help teams sort, prioritize, and respond to emails in a hassle-free, efficient manner. Such a tool is useful in streamlining both internal and external communication as well as driving visibility and ownership across the team. Additionally, it adapts and learns from user behavior over time, becoming more effective at predicting preferences and needs. 

To put it simply, it’s a tool that leverages AI to help you manage and organize your emails.

Benefits of AI Email Management Software

AI tools can be very effective in bringing order to your inbox. Here are some key benefits of using one – 

  • Increased team productivity – All incoming emails are automatically categorized, prioritized, and assigned to the team member that’s best suited to respond to that email. 
  • Access to key data insights – You get important insights into your email habits like response time, and communication patterns, which can help you optimize your workflows. 
  • Intelligent suggestions and automated responses – AI can come up with intelligent email template suggestions which employees can use to quickly respond to customers and other stakeholders.
  • Enhanced collaboration – An AI email management tool helps you collaborate with your team faster. You can delegate tasks, assign responsibilities, and maintain visibility of who’s doing what – all without any manual effort. 

A Quick Rundown of the 8 Best AI Email Management Software

Here is a list of the 8 best AI email management software your team can consider. As a general rule, look for an option that is easy to use, scalable, and cost-effective. 

AI Email Management ToolStarting PriceFree Trial
HiverFree plan7 days
Help Scout$22 /user/month15 days
Zoho DeskFree up to 3 users15 days
Zendesk$55/agent/month14 days
Freshdesk$14.36/agent/month21 days
Sanebox$3.49/month14 days
Intercom$39/month per seat14 days
Front$19/user/month7 days

1. Hiver

Hiver is an AI-powered email management tool that helps businesses of all sizes manage their email communications expertly. It helps you manage group emails (IDs like support@, help@, info@) from the comfort of your work inbox. Teams can delegate emails, collaborate on responses, track the status of tasks, and more importantly, automate workflows.

The best part about Hiver is that it works as an extension to your Gmail or Outlook inbox. That makes the tool extremely easy to set up and use. Normally, teams can get started with it in a couple of hours.

Harvey by Hiver

Hiver has built Harvey, its own AI bot that utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP),to enhance your email management capabilities. Here’s how:

  • Email Summarizer – Think about this scenario – a customer and an agent go back and forth several times resulting in a long email thread. The issue gets escalated to a supervisor. Now in order to catch up with what’s going on and figure out the best course of action, the supervisor will have to go through the entire email thread trying to put pieces together. Not only will this take a lot of time, it is also a frustrating task for anybody to do.

    Hiver’s email summarizer compresses any email thread into a concise summary for your reference. Instead of reading through numerous emails on a thread, you’ll only have to go through a few bullet points. This ensures very smooth hand-offs and that no vital information gets missed out. AI reduces the possibility of human error that can happen when manually digesting information. 
  • Intelligent email template suggestions – Email templates are a great way to deliver quick responses. However, it can often be overwhelming to choose the ‘best template’ in a particular context. Harvey analyzes emails and comes up with the most relevant template that you can use. This way you can deliver a satisfactory response much quicker. You can also combine parts of Harvey’s suggested templates with your own inputs to draft more personalized responses.
  • ‘Thank you’ detection – Often, after a customer support agent has resolved and closed a ticket, the customer sends a ‘thank you’ message. This message does not require any further action but it reopens the conversation. Harvey identifies and closes these conversations, which would otherwise have to be manually closed.

    Now, if you’re managing hundreds of such conversations on a daily basis, your team would have to spend a lot of time and effort doing this. What’s worse is that closing these conversations manually would also skew important metrics like Average Resolution Time. 

Hiver also has a free AI email generator you can use to craft professional emails in a matter of seconds. All you need to do is enter a prompt and specify the tone and the length of the email.

Pricing:

Hiver offers four pricing plans – 

  • Forever free plan
  • Lite plan: $19/per user/per month
  • Pro plan: $49/per user/per month (Harvey is available in this plan and onwards) 
  • Elite plan: $79/per user/per month

Free Trial: 7 days

2. Help Scout

Help Scout is a support tool that helps businesses efficiently manage customer emails from a centralized platform. It has a user-friendly interface and powerful features such as email routing and prioritization, automations, response templates, and email tagging.

AI Summarizer by Hiver
AI summarize by Help Scout

Help Scout’s AI-powered tool ‘AI summarize’ creates a bullet point summary of long email threads. This frees up the time of support agents who would otherwise have to comb through the entire thread to get the context needed to deliver a helpful response. 

Note: AI Summarize is still in beta testing and is only available to users on current Plus and Pro plans (except those using the HIPAA compliance feature).

Pricing:

  • Standard: $22 per user/per month
  • Plus: $44 per user/per month
  • Pro: $65 per user/per month
    *Plans are billed annually

Pay 40% lesser than Help Scout

Free trial:

15 days

3. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a cloud-based customer service platform suited for businesses of all sizes. It makes it easy to assign, track, and respond to customer emails from one central location by converting them into tickets.

Zia - AI tool by Zoho Desk
Zia by Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk’s AI Assistant Zia can help identify the sentiment behind any email that comes in. This adds some extra context to the nature of the ticket, based on which agents can prioritize and respond in the best possible way. Additionally, Zia assigns incoming tickets to agents on the basis of their skill-set and provides recommendations on what the response can be. 

Pricing:

  • Free: Free Plan (up to 3 agents)
  • Standard: $16.75 per user/per month
  • Professional: $25.15per user/per month
  • Enterprise: $38.32 per user/per month

Recommended Read: Zoho Desk Pricing: Does it offer value for your money?

Free trial:

15 days

4. Zendesk

Zendesk is a multi-channel help desk that comes with some powerful AI email management features. It offers ‘Zendesk Advanced AI’ as an add-on which is built into the Suite Professional and Enterprise Plans.

Zendesk - AI email management feature
Zendesk UI

Zendesk’s basic AI features include bots that can understand the type of issue your customer is having and solve them without getting an agent involved. For more complex issues that the bots can’t address, they guide agents based on content from your help center. 

Zendesk’s Advanced AI includes more advanced bots that come pre-trained to understand the top customer issues. It also includes intelligent triage and macro suggestions. It must be noted that this comes as an add-on that costs $50/agent per month and is only available for those on a Suite Professional plan or higher.

Compared to other similar solutions, Zendesk is a little pricier. Setting it up can be a time-consuming process too, as it has a somewhat complex interface. These reasons make it more suitable for larger enterprises. 

Pricing:

Zendesk has three tiers of pricing for small to large-sized businesses.

  • Suite Team: $55 per agent per month
  • Suite Growth: $89 per agent per month
  • Suite Professional: $115 per agent per month

For enterprise companies, Zendesk has two tiers of pricing:

  • Suite Enterprise: $150 per agent per month
  • Additional and more powerful enterprise plans start at $215 per agent per month

Free trial:

14 days

5. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is another popular customer support tool ideal for small and medium-sized businesses. It’s comprehensive email management capabilities enable businesses to manage multiple email inboxes (like info@ and support@) and resolve customer queries that arrive in them, by converting these queries into tickets.

Freshdesk’s free plan makes them a good choice for teams on a tight budget that are looking for an AI email management solution. 

Freddy- customer support AI tool by Fresh Desk
Freddy AI by Fresh Desk

Fresh Desk’s AI Bot, Freddy, focuses on improving agent experience and productivity. It continuously studies past tickets and resolution pathways to learn from them. This learning enables Freddy to make relevant suggestions to agents who can take less time responding to the emails.

Freddy also conducts sentiment analysis to prioritize and categorize emails automatically. Email tickets are smartly assigned to relevant teams or agents based on the context of the queries.

Pricing:

Freshdesk’s Support System offers four price tiers:

  • Free: Starter plan for unlimited agents but with limited features
  • Growth: $14.36 per agent per month billed annually
  • Pro: $51.48 per agent per month billed annually
  • Enterprise: $82.62 per agent per month billed annually

Freshdesk’s Omnichannel system offers three price tiers:

  • Omnichannel Growth: $29 per agent per month billed annually
  • Omnichannel – Pro: $59 per agent per month billed annually
  • Omnichannel – Enterprise: $99 per user per month billed annually

Free trial:

21 days

6. Sanebox

Sanebox is an AI email assistant that helps organize and prioritize emails in your inbox. It does this by automatically sorting your email into different folders like Inbox, SaneLater, and SaneNews, based on their importance. 

It also offers features that offer the ability to block annoying senders, and help set up reminders to follow up on important emails.

Sanebox - AI email assistant
Sanebox UI

Sanebox’s AI learns your email habits over time and personalizes its algorithm based on your behavior and preferences. Which emails you open, which ones you respond to, the speed and frequency of your responses are all studied to make better suggestions to you. 

Pricing:

Sanebox has three pricing plans:

  • Snack: 1 account with any two features for $3.49 monthly
  • Lunch: 2 accounts with six features each for $5.99 monthly
  • Dinner: 4 accounts with all features for $16.99 monthly

Free trial:

14 days

7. Intercom

Intercom is another powerful customer support tool that streamlines customer email communication by enabling the collection, tracking, and routing of customer queries.

Fin chatbot by Intercom
Fin by Intercom

Intercom has an AI chatbot, named Fin that uses GPT-4 technology to answer queries directly thereby reducing the volume of tickets your team have to deal with. Fin is multilingual and can detect the language used by the customer to resolve issues in 43 different languages. It passes over the more complex problems to your support agents so as to ensure that the customer gets a satisfying solution all the time. 

With the “Conversations in Inbox” feature, agents can easily oversee all of Fin’s interactions and make sure customer emails are being addressed appropriately.

Intercom does, however, have a learning curve and can be complex to use. Moreover, for teams with restricted budgets, it can be considered expensive. 

Pricing:

Intercom’s pricing chart is notoriously complicated, but in a nutshell, it offers four types of pricing plans: 

  • Start: $39 per month per seat 
  • Advanced: $99 per month (includes 5 seats)
  • Expert: $139 per month
  • Accelerate: from $499 per month (includes 10 seats)
  • Scale: from $999 per month (includes 10 seats)

Note: Intercom charges an additional $0.99 every time Fin answers a customer’s question. To avail this rate, you must have an active Intercom plan. Any extra resolutions beyond your contract are billed monthly on your regular payment date.

Free trial:

14 days

8. Front

Front is an email management software designed to streamline team collaboration and communication. It centralizes emails, messages, and tasks into a single platform, allowing teams to manage shared inboxes efficiently.

Front email management software
Front UI

Front uses ChatGPT’s API to allow users to quickly draft messages based on ongoing conversation context or a few bullet points. This feature allows for tone and language adjustments through a dropdown menu, enhancing the quality of customer communication.

Additionally, you can summarize long conversations with a single click. These AI-generated summaries include customer happiness scores and recommendations for the next steps. This tool aids in collaboration, allowing teams to share summaries and work together seamlessly.

Pricing:

Front offers four pricing plans-

  • Starter plan priced at $19/user/month
  • Growth plan priced at $59/user/month
  • Scale plan priced at $99/user/month
  • Premier plan priced at $229/user/month

How to choose the right AI email management software?

As you can see there are quite a few options available in the market. To simplify your decision-making process, here are a few key factors to keep in mind – 

  • Features – The first thing to look out for is if the tool has the features you’ll need to effectively manage your emails. Hiver was designed keeping in mind, both businesses and their customers. It makes it easy for businesses to assign, track, and resolve emails, while customers get helpful, timely responses to their queries. 
  • User interface – In order to ensure your team is able to easily navigate the platform, opt for one with a simple, easy-to-use interface. Take for example, a tool like Hiver. It is intuitive and requires next to no training to use because it works inside Gmail. 
  • Pricing – This is another key component to consider when narrowing down on which AI email management software to purchase. Ultimately, it boils down to whether or not you’re getting value for your money and if it fits in your budget. Hiver is pretty reasonably priced that even small to medium-sized businesses can afford it. 

50% of support experts believe that AI and Humans will work together in the future

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The Bottom Line

The right AI email management tool can transform the way you manage emails. You won’t feel overwhelmed by your inbox and will be able to provide timely responses to the different stakeholders – customers, vendors, partners etc. 

If you would like to try your hand with Hiver before committing to a purchase, sign up here and get 7 free days. 

FAQS

  • Why is Hiver recommended for businesses using Google Workspace?
    • Hiver is designed exclusively for businesses using Google Workspace, providing seamless integration with Gmail. Its intuitive interface and minimal training requirements make it an ideal choice for various teams, including customer support, finance, people operations, and ITSM.
  • How does Hiver’s AI bot, Harvey, enhance email management?
    • Harvey employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) to offer intelligent email template suggestions, helping users choose relevant templates quickly. It also detects and closes “thank you” messages, saving time for support teams and preventing unnecessary reopening of resolved conversations.
  • What pricing plans does Hiver offer?
    • Hiver offers three pricing plans: Lite ($19/user/month),Pro ($49/user/month),and Elite ($79/user/month, including Harvey). A 7-day free trial is available for users to explore its features.
  • Which email management tool provides a summary of long email threads?
    • Help Scout’s AI-powered tool, ‘AI Summarize,’ creates a bullet-point summary of lengthy email threads, saving support agents time by providing quick context for more efficient responses.
  • What makes Freshdesk’s AI Bot, Freddy, stand out?
    • Freddy focuses on improving agent experience and productivity by learning from past tickets and suggesting relevant responses. It conducts sentiment analysis and intelligently assigns and categorizes emails based on context, enhancing overall ticket management.
  • How does Sanebox organize and prioritize emails?
    • Sanebox acts as an AI email assistant by automatically sorting emails into different folders like Inbox, SaneLater, and SaneNews, based on their importance. It also personalizes its algorithm over time, studying user behavior to make better email management suggestions.
  • What is the role of Intercom’s AI chatbot, Fin?
    • Intercom’s AI chatbot, Fin, utilizes GPT-4 technology to directly answer customer queries, reducing the volume of tickets. Fin is multilingual, capable of detecting customer language preferences, and passes complex problems to support agents for a comprehensive solution.
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I create helpful content on customer service. I'm an active member of customer experience communities. And I strongly believe that the world would be a better place with more Tiramisu.

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