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7 Best AI Email Management Tools in 2023
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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 seven of the best options. We will discuss their features, pricing, and pros and cons.
Table of Contents
- What is AI Email Management Software?
- Benefits of AI Email Management Software
- A Quick Rundown of the 7 Best AI Email Management Software
- How to choose the right AI email management software?
- The Bottom Line
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 7 Best AI Email Management Software
Here is a list of the 7 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.
1. Hiver
Hiver is a collaborative email management tool that caters exclusively to businesses that use Google Workspace. The platform can be used by various teams such as customer support, finance, people operations, and ITSM. Given that it works on top of Gmail, Hiver’s interface is intuitive, user-friendly and requires minimal training to get started.
Hiver’s AI bot, named Harvey utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) to enhance your email management capabilities. Here’s how:
- 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 to create custom responses.
- ‘Thank you’ detection – Often, after a support agent has resolved and closed a conversation, the customer will send 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, assuming you manage 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.
Recommended Read: 23 Email Management Best Practices and Tips
Pricing:
Hiver comes with three types of pricing plans –
- Lite plan: $15/per user/per month
- Pro plan: $39/per user/per month
- Elite plan: $59/per user/per month (Harvey is available in this plan)
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.
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: $20 per user/per month
- Plus: $40 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.
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)
- Express: $7 per user/per month
- Standard: $14 per user/per month
- Professional: $23 per user/per month
- Enterprise: $40 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’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.
However, 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: $49 per agent per month
- Suite Growth: $79 per agent per month
- Suite Professional: $99 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.
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: $15 per agent per month billed annually
- Pro: $49 per agent per month billed annually
- Enterprise: $69 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’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.
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
- Grow: $99 per month (includes 5 seats)
- 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
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.
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.
