12 Best Email Ticketing Systems for 2024
Table of contents
How can companies provide world-class customer support via email?
The answer is simple – by implementing an email ticketing system.
A system like this helps support teams handle customer emails at scale. It streamlines the entire process – from receiving a customer email to resolving it – ensuring your support team can make optimal use of their time and effort.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the 12 top ticketing systems that can revolutionise how your business handles customer support.
Table of Contents
- What is an email ticketing system?
- Top 12 email ticketing systems in 2024
- Key features to look for in an email ticketing system
- Best practices for using an email ticketing system
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Wrapping up
What is an email ticketing system?
An email ticketing system is a tool designed to streamline customer emails effectively. The primary purpose of such a tool is to ensure that customer communications are tracked, responded to, and resolved in an efficient and organized manner.
The way it does this is by turning every customer email into a ‘ticket’. Each ‘ticket’ has a unique identification number – this helps teams get visibility and keep track of every customer email query, till the point of resolution.
Email ticketing systems have features such as automation (to create workflows),tagging (to categorize customer emails),and analytics (to measure support quality and agent performance).
It’s not just customer service teams that benefit from email ticketing systems; even departments like Finance, IT, and Client Servicing can also leverage these tools to efficiently streamline inquiries and requests.
Recommended read: Customer Support Ticketing System: The Complete Guide
Top 12 email ticketing systems in 2024
Here are the top 12 email ticketing systems your business can pick up. Look for ease of setup, ease of training, range of features, and cost before making a decision.
| Tool | Best Suited For | Key Features | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hiver | Small, medium, and large businesses using Google Workspace | Email assignment, automation, reporting, customer feedback surveys, 24×7 vendor support | $19/month/user |
| Freshdesk | Small and large businesses | Collision detection, shared ownership, gamification | $15/month/user |
| Jitbit | Startups, medium-sized businesses, freelancers | Ticket categorization, assignment, analytics, live chat, knowledge base | $29/month/user |
| HappyFox | Medium and enterprise organizations | Private notes, ticket assignment, categorization, chatbot | $9/month/user |
| Front | Small to large organizations with a focus on email support | Ticket routing, shared drafts, live chat, analytics, universal inbox | $19/month/user |
| Help Scout | Small businesses, startups, nonprofits | Automation, response templates, analytics, live chat, knowledge base | $22/month/user |
| Zendesk | Large and enterprise companies | Collaboration tools, omnichannel integration | $55/month/user |
| Zoho Desk | Businesses that need a multi-channel customer service platform | Sentiment analysis, multilingual support, email templates | $15.55/month/user |
| LiveAgent | Businesses that need a customer service platform that offers a high level of customization | Ticket tagging, SLA management, canned responses | $9//month/user |
| Intercom | E-commerce, financial services, education, healthcare | Ticket creation and collaboration, live chat, in-app messaging | $39/month/user |
| HelpCrunch | Online and e-commerce businesses | Email management, multi-channel communication, SLA management | $12/month/user |
| ProProfs Desk | Small and large-sized businesses | Ticket management, chat support, email integration, multilingual support | $19.99/month/user |
1. Hiver
Hiver is the world’s first Gmail-based email ticketing system. Given that it’s built for Google Workspace and looks and feels like Gmail, its interface is straightforward, user-friendly, and easy to understand. It comes with powerful email ticketing features, including email assignment, tracking, automation, reporting, customer feedback surveys, and more.
Hiver also helps team members collaborate effectively with the help of its Notes feature which allows them to have private and contextual discussions about customer requests right next to email threads.
Hiver’s greatest USP is its ability to humanize customer conversations. Unlike most email ticketing software that converts customer emails into support tickets, Hiver doesn’t assign ticket numbers to customer requests.
By doing so, it helps support teams see the human behind every incoming request or query. Hiver is built to drive long-term, meaningful customer relationships by preventing teams from looking at customer emails as one-time transactions and not reducing customers to faceless tickets.
Apart from its rich feature set and its ability to streamline the customer experience, teams love Hiver because of the impeccable 24×7 customer service it offers.
Did You Know: Among the top 12 email ticketing systems in 2024, Hiver is the only one specifically designed for Google Workspace teams.
Best suited for:
Small, medium, and large-sized businesses using Google Workspace.
Key features:
- Email delegation
- Live chat
- Voice Communication
- WhatsApp Support
- Knowledge Base
- Email tags
- Email notes
- Collision alerts
- Email templates
- Automations
- Analytics
- SLA management
- Customer satisfaction surveys
- Hiver offers integrations with the most frequently used apps such as Jira, Asana, Salesforce, QuickBooks, Okta and more.
- Harvey – The AI Bot.
Pricing:
Hiver offers four price tiers:
1. Free forever plan
2. Lite: $19 per user per month
3. Pro: $49 per user per month
4. Elite: $79 per user per month
Free Trial: 7 days
2. Freshdesk
Freshdesk’s email ticketing system is amongst the most sophisticated in the industry. Its shared inbox makes it convenient for teams to organize, assign, and collaborate on email tickets. It converts customer requests from email and social channels into tickets. Further, it helps categorize and assign those tickets to designated agents. In the higher tier plans, agents can also share the ownership of tickets with others in the team.
The best part about Freshdesk is that it gives support agents rich context about a customer’s past interactions with your company, their feedback, and their previous support issues.
The other features that Freshdesk offers include automation, agent collision detection, a self-service portal, and a knowledge base (FAQs, help guides, etc.). It also provides gamification features to encourage and engage agents.
Best suited for:
Small and large-sized businesses.
Key Features:
- Automation
- Ticket trends and reporting
- Collision detection
- Rich customer context
- Shared ownership of tasks
- Integration with many apps like Google apps, JIRA, Dropbox, Mailchimp, Zoho CRM and several others through Zapier
Pricing: Freshdesk’s pricing starts at $15 per agent per month and goes up to $79 per agent per month. It also offers a free plan, but with limited features.
Free Trial: 21 days
3. Jitbit
JitBit is a popular email-based ticketing system that allows teams to process, assign, track, and automate incoming email tickets. Given that it has a relatively simpler interface compared to other email ticketing systems in its category, teams can set it up easily and start using it without too much hassle.
What also makes JitBit one of the most sought-after ticket management tools is its price. Unlike most other email ticketing software, Jitbit offers flat monthly and annual pricing options, which means that its plans aren’t priced per agent.
Jitbit offers a cloud-based as well as a hosted version of its email ticketing system to suit different types and needs of businesses.
Best suited for:
Small and medium-sized businesses, freelancers.
Key features:
- Ticket categorization and tagging
- Ticket status
- Assignment and tracking
- Analytics dashboard and metrics reports
- Live chat
- Knowledge base
- Email templates
- Collision alerts
Pricing: Plans start at $29 per month per agent.
Free Trial: 21 days
4. HappyFox
Founded in 2011, HappyFox is a help desk software that helps teams effectively perform all the essential functions of a good ticketing system. This includes assigning incoming emails to the right team members, categorizing tickets based on their type, status, or priority, automating repeatable tasks like changing the status of emails, round-robin ticket assignments, SLA management, and more.
It also lets you measure key metrics like first response time, time spent on tickets by staff, and more. Despite its extensive feature set, HappyFox has a rather simple and intuitive interface that makes it a preferred email ticketing system for medium to large-scale organizations alike.
Best suited for:
Medium-sized and enterprise organizations looking for an efficient email ticketing system.
Key features:
- Private notes
- Ticket assignment
- Ticket categorization
- Knowledge base
- Chatbot support
Pricing:
HappyFox offers 4 pricing tiers, namely, ‘Basic’, ‘Team’, ‘Pro’, and ‘Enterprise’. The pricing starts at $9 per user per month
Free Trial: Not available
5. Front
Front is a shared inbox software that helps teams work and collaborate out of a common mailbox. Every incoming new ticket (be it via email, social, or live chat) lands in a central email inbox from where they can be assigned to team members based on availability and expertise.
Front is designed to encourage a highly collaborative work environment. It gives team members complete visibility into each other’s tasks and equips them with features (like shared drafts) that help them work together and make the most of each other’s expertise while handling incoming tickets.
Best suited for:
Small to large scale organizations with a primary focus on email support.
Key features:
- Ticket routing, categorization, and tagging
- Shared drafts
- Canned responses
- Live chat
- Analytics
- Universal inbox
- Knowledge content management
Pricing: Plans range from $19 per person per month to $229 per person per month.
Free Trial: 7 days
Hiver vs Front: Reasons, Reviews, and Ratings
6. Help Scout
Help Scout is another popular email-based ticketing system that helps teams, both small and large, manage their common mailboxes with ease. It has a clean interface and comes with features essential for efficient team email management like ticket routing and prioritization, automation, analytics, response templates, and tagging, amongst many others.
Apart from its ticketing system, Help Scout’s customers can also make the most of its built-in knowledge base and live chat functionalities. Further, its hassle-free integrations can easily allow your system to work with new and existing customer channels and databases.
Best suited for:
Small businesses, scaling startups, and nonprofits.
Key features:
- Rule-based automation
- Response templates
- Robust analytics
- Live chat
- Knowledge base
- Ticket routing, tagging, and prioritization
Hiver vs Help Scout: Reasons, Reviews, and Ratings
Pricing: HelpScout has three price tiers. Plans start from $22 per user per month.
Free Trial: 15 days
Top 10 Help Scout Alternatives for Businesses
7. Zendesk
Zendesk is an email ticketing system that’s ideal for teams that use multiple support channels and want a centralized hub to connect with their customers seamlessly across those various channels. This help desk software is especially useful for bigger teams with a large customer base as it helps integrate all customer interactions into one system, thereby providing teams with rich context into past customer interactions without having to do much digging.
Zendesk allows teams to conveniently track, organize and resolve email tickets while also empowering customers to resolve their own problems with the help of its community forums and self-service knowledge bases.
Best suited for:
Large and enterprise-sized companies looking for an all-in-one customer service ticketing system.
Key features:
- Ticket assignment
- Powerful analytics
- Automation
- SLA management
Pricing: Zendesk has four price tiers for small to large-sized businesses. Plans start at $55 per agent per month and go up to $115 per agent per month.
Free Trial: 14 days
Hiver vs Zendesk: Reasons, Reviews, and Ratings
8. Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is an email ticketing system that empowers teams with highly contextual email management capabilities. Its sentiment analysis tool helps agents gauge the sentiment in a customer ticket before opening it. As a result, agents can respond to negative tickets faster.
Zoho’s helpdesk ticketing system also allows teams to collect tickets from multiple other channels apart from emails, such as social media, live chat, web forms, and telephone.
Best suited for:
Teams looking for a ticketing solution that offers multi-channel capabilities.
Key features:
- Reports and Analytics
- Sentiment analysis
- Feedback widget
- Multilingual support
- Email templates
- Multichannel support
Pricing: Plans start at $15.55 per agent per month. Zoho Desk also offers a forever free eplan with limited features for up to 3 agents.
Free Trial: 15 days
9. LiveAgent
LiveAgent offers teams an advanced email ticketing solution that comes with a “universal inbox” and a “hybrid ticket stream”. With its universal inbox, team members can perform basic ticketing system functions such as organizing, assigning, and resolving customer tickets from a common dashboard. With its hybrid ticket stream, teams can follow up on customers’ ticket resolution journeys across multiple channels.
LiveAgent, like most popular email ticketing systems, helps teams automate repetitive tasks. Apart from that, this email ticketing software also offers features like canned responses for common customer issues, automated ticket routing, SLA management, and more.
Best suited for:
Teams looking for customizable email ticketing solutions.
Key Features:
- Workflow automation
- Ticket tagging and organizing
- SLA management
- Internal notes
Pricing: The email ticketing tool starts at $9 per agent per month. It also offers a forever free plan with limited features.
Free Trial: 14 days
10. Intercom
Intercom’s ticketing platform, also known as the Engagement OS, enables teams to easily collect, track and route customer queries. The platform comes with essential features for support teams to organize their workload, and resolve tickets via seamless collaboration.
It also has a ‘Messenger’ feature, which combines different apps in one window to perform a variety of actions; such as finding an answer in the knowledge base or starting a conversation.
Best suited for:
Early-stage to enterprise companies, in industries such as e-commerce, financial services, education, and healthcare.
Key Features:
- Ticket Creation
- Ticket Collaboration
- Live Chat Support
- In-App Messaging
- Knowledge Base
Pricing: Plans start at $39 per month per seat and goes up to $139 per month.
Free Trial: 14 days
11. HelpCrunch
HelpCrunch’s email ticketing software enables teams to manage multiple shared inboxes. With HelpCrunch, teams can easily streamline tickets and also make use of advanced features, such as team productivity analytics and detailed customer profiles. Streamlining of tickets can be done by tagging, assigning, and merging customer conversations.
Apart from customer support, even sales and marketing teams can make use of HelpCrunch. For instance, marketing teams can make use of email marketing campaign builders, and lead generation solutions.
Best suited for:
Online and e-commerce businesses of all sizes that want to decrease support costs and grow faster.
Key Features:
- Email Management
- Multi-Channel Communication
- Knowledge Base Management
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management
Pricing: The basic plan starts at $12 per user per month.
Free Trial: 14 days
12. ProProfsDesk
ProProfs Desk is a customer support and email ticketing system software designed to streamline communication and collaboration between businesses and customers. ProProfs Desk can be customized to meet the specific needs of different businesses and can be integrated with other popular tools such as Slack, Salesforce, and Zapier. The software is cloud-based, meaning that users can access it from anywhere with an internet connection. ProProfs Desk aims to help businesses provide fast, efficient, and personalized support to their customers while reducing costs and increasing productivity.
Best suited for:
Small and large-sized businesses.
Key Features:
- Ticket management
- Knowledge base
- Chat support
- Reports and analytics
- Automation
Pricing: Comes with 2 pricing plans – single user and multi-user. The single user plan is free forever, and the multi-user plan is priced at $19.99 per user per month.
Key features to look for in an email ticketing system
When you’re in the process of selecting the right email ticketing system, it’s important to make a list of features that you’re looking for. For those managing extensive email communications, using dedicated bulk email management software can further optimize inbox organization and streamline responses.
To make things easier, I’ve put together a list of the most important features you need to look out for.
This list might change depending on your specific needs but it’s a good place to start.
- Automations: It helps you assign, tag, and respond to customer queries – with no manual effort. For instance, all queries on billing can be auto-assigned to a billing specialist.
- Collaboration Features: Sometimes, solving customer issues would need teamwork. Look for a system where your support staff can collaborate, share notes, and escalate issues to the right people.
- Customizable Views: Managers should be able to up custom views for their team members. For example, a frontline agent should only see their tickets. This helps avoid information overload and ensures security protocols are followed.
- Performance Tracking: Your ticketing system should track key metrics on response and resolution time, customer satisfaction, and agent performance. This helps identify areas where you can improve support quality.
- SLA Management: The system should let you set and track Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This ensures that customer queries are responded to and resolved on time. For instance, you can setup an SLA where all incoming customer queries are responded to within 24 working hours.
- Multi-Channel Support: Different customers would reach out to you in different ways. Some would prefer email, some would opt to chat with you in real-time, others might opt to tag you on social and express their opinion. Look for a system that brings all these queries and comments into one single place.
- Integration Capabilities: Your helpdesk ticketing software should integrate with other tools that you’re currently using – CRM, project management software, and more
- Mobile Accessibility: If you’re ticketing system comes with a mobile app, that makes it easier for your customer support team to manage tickets on the go. They aren’t tied to their desktops.
Best practices for using an email ticketing system
Once you get an email ticketing system that suits your organization’s needs, the next step is to ensure you get the most value from it.
That’s where some best practices come in handy. Let’s take a look at them.
- Train your agents: The most fundamental step is to train your agents to use the email ticketing system. Make sure they know how to navigate the interface, and use its main features. One pro tip is that you can have training sessions every 3 months to cover updates or changes.
- Categorize and Prioritize: Categorize tickets by type (like technical issues or billing queries). Prioritize them based on urgency. You can also use color-coded labels and tags to visually highlight priority levels.
- Use Templates Wisely: Canned responses can speed up replies. But use them carefully. Make sure the response template fits the customer’s query. Also, do not forget to personalize certain parts of the email, such as name, before sending them.
- Maintain a Knowledge Base: Update and optimize the content on your knowledge base regularly. Sync up with your support team once a month and see if there are any commonly asked questions from customers that haven’t been answered on the knowledge base, and ensure they’re added.
- Set Clear SLAs: Define clear Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for response and resolution time. Also, make sure to monitor them regularly.
- Gather and Act on Feedback: After resolving a ticket, ask for customer feedback. You can use this feedback to spot areas for improvement and make changes accordingly.
- Keep Customers Informed: Always update customers on their ticket status, especially if there are delays. Proactive communication can prevent frustration and build trust. You can use automated emails that convey the status of their inquiries.
- Encourage Internal Feedback: Your agents are the main users of the ticketing system. Encourage them to provide feedback on the system’s functions and any challenges they face. You can even have a bi-monthly meeting where all your support staff share what they like, and don’t like about using the software.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Here are some frequently asked questions about email ticketing systems.
1. How does an email ticketing system improve customer service?
It improves customer service by providing a structured approach to managing inquiries. It helps prioritize, track and collaborate on issues. This results in quicker response times and higher customer satisfaction.
2. Can email ticketing systems be integrated with other tools?
Yes, most email ticketing systems offer integration capabilities with other business tools such as CRM software, live chat, and knowledge bases.
3. Are email ticketing systems suitable for small businesses?
Yes, there are email ticketing systems that are specifically suitable for small businesses. Platforms like Hiver, Zendesk, and Freshdesk, for instance, offer cost-effective pricing plans for small businesses.
4. Can I track the performance of my customer service team with an email ticketing system?
Yes, these systems often include an analytics and reporting dashboard that helps in tracking key performance indicators such as first response time and average resolution time.
5. What is the role of automation in email ticketing systems?
Automation in email ticketing systems helps route and categorize tickets and change the status of tickets – without any manual effort.
Wrapping up
There’s no one-size-fits-all formula to achieve customer service excellence. Your customer service needs and goals are hugely dependent on the nature of your business, the type of customers you serve, and the long-term vision you have for your organization.
Having said that, investing in an email ticketing system is essential for all companies spanning different industries and sizes.
Why? Because email is one of the easiest, cost-effective, and efficient ways to deliver support. And by implementing the right email ticketing system, companies can focus on scaling effectively and providing their customers with impeccable customer experiences while their ticketing software does the heavy lifting for them in the background.
Good luck with your search for the best email ticketing system!
