Customer service is an integral part of a company's success. Nowadays, companies face fierce market competition, and their success depends largely on excellent customer relations. To satisfy customers and stand out from the competition, you need to use the best customer service tools.

Here is a roundup of the 10 best customer service tools that you can use in 2022, including their benefits and pricing, so you can make the right choice for your business!

What Is The Best Customer Service Tool In 2022?

1. Email Meter

Best for: Anyone who wants to turn their current Gmail setup into a powerful Customer Service platform.

Email Meter is the leading email analytics solution. It provides companies with employee performance and productivity metrics such as workload and response times to help them make informed, data-driven decisions. When used as a Customer Service Platform, it can connect to your Support teams’ inbox directly. This means they can keep using their normal email client, but you’ll be able to pull a huge range of statistics and insights, all on an easy-to-use dashboard.

Email Meter Best Features

• Manage a team of any size, from a single inbox to a large enterprise.
• No need to learn a new ticketing system—works on top of your current Gmail/Google workspace setup.
• See the workload for each of your team members, including in shared inboxes.
• Instant installation for your entire domain.
• Fully customizable dashboards are available, or choose from a variety of useful pre-made metrics.

“Our managers really enjoy being able to monitor the volume if inbound and abound emails of shared inboxes as well as individual employee's inboxes. They also like seeing the response times of those emails. The tool really gives you insight into the workload of a particular employees inbox.There are so many other features of this software that we have not used but know that they would add tremendous value.” - Chris T. on Capterra

Email Meter Pricing

• Free forever. Individual metrics on a monthly basis.
• Pro: 15$/month yearly payment ($180) or $19/month. Unlocks filtering, 2 years of past data and other advanced features.
• Teams: 15$/user/month yearly ($180) or $19/user/month. An extension of Pro, adds the ability to see your whole team from a central dashboard, and generate full reports for any combination of team members.
• Enterprise: Pricing dependent on needs. Unlocks the most powerful features, generally recommended for teams of 15+ members. Completely custom dashboards and metrics can be created for you upon request.

2. HelpScout

Best for: Anyone looking for a simple, easy to use Customer Service platform.

Help Scout connects to your existing shared inbox, while also giving you access to a client to improve collaboration. You can see replies, tag people and resolve tickets, turning your inbox into a more customer service focused experience.

HelpScout Best Features

• Tagging and other collaboration features help your Support coordinate with each other.
• Shared inbox connection allows you to manage workload effectively.
• Reporting features allow you to track KPIs.
• You can create saved replies and help center content.

“I have nothing to say about Help Scout's services, it does an excellent job, hands down. Though it's lacking some features and the pricing is a little bit high based on what features they offer. If you want just a basic customer service software for handling emails then Help Scout is a good choice.” - Abraham C. on Capterra

HelpScout Pricing

• Basic version is free forever.
• Pro: $25/user/month if billed monthly, or $20/user/month if billed yearly. 2 mailboxes and up to 25 users.
• Plus: $50/user/month if billed monthly, or $40/user/month if billed yearly. 5 mailboxes and no max user count, among other extra features.
• Enterprise: $65/user/month billed yearly (yearly only). Up to 25 mailboxes, among the rest of their most powerful features.

3. Crisp

Best for: Anyone looking for a cheap or freenium solution.

A chat and email helpdesk platform, Crisp allows you to connect with your customers and reply to their queries and issues. It has a good range of customization options using Plugins, and has analytics available. Automation allows you to save time on routine tasks.

Crisp Best Features

• Allows your whole team to communicate with your customers via email and chat, which integrate with each other seamlessly.
• Ticket based system which you can resolve, label and tag teammates in.
• Powerful range of Plugins allow you to create bots, saved replies, Help Center articles, triggers, and much more.
• A wide range of integrations for connecting Crisp to other services.

“ Overall experience, users map, plugins that work with other tools (e.g. Slack), great sync between web app, desktop app and mobile one; team features; possible integration to inner CRM/authorization system, full-functional search, detailed users profile” - Alex M. on Capterra

Crisp Pricing

• Basic version is free forever. Only includes on-site chat, no email.
• Pro: $25/month/workspace, with 4 seats included. Includes email and other more powerful features.
• Unlimited: $95/month/workspace, with 25 seats included. Their full range of most powerful features.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing available upon request. Has custom SLAs, custom features and a custom onboarding.

4. Intercom

Best for: Anyone with the money to spend who is looking for a powerful and customizable all-in-one solution

Intercom describes itself as an ‘engagement OS’. It’s focused heavily on giving you as many different ways to connect with your customers and leads as possible. It has a very sleek UI and is easy to use. With a wide range of ways to customize your customer’s experience, it’s also a very powerful tool.

Intercom Best Features

• Integrated email and chat support. Can also be used to send ‘campaigns’ to your users, including to their email.
• Has all the needed features of a help desk, including saved replies, tagging, segmentation, the ability to create an automatic bot, and to create a Help Center.
• It focuses on making your Support, Sales and Marketing teams work together. As well as full Support features, it Includes features like a CRM for Sales and segmented campaigns for Marketing.

“Really simple, fast and easy to use CRM platform. It has multiple helpful features such as custom bots, emailing and product tours that I'm using quite often. Also, making a help center in Intercom is such a great experience!” - Edil T. on Capterra

Intercom Pricing

• Starter: $74/month when billed annually, or $79/month billed monthly. Pricing is then based on number of seats (agents) and number of people reached. 2 seats are included in Starter, as well as 1000 people reached per month (which they claim is enough for most small businesses).
• Any additional seat in Starter is $19/month, up to a maximum of 25. For an extra 1000 people reached, you’re charged a flat rate of $50/month, up to a maximum of 50,000 people.
• Beyond ‘Starter’, the rest of Intercom’s pricing is calculated based off seats and number of people reached per month. Pricing is available upon request.

Extra features:

• Product tours from $199/month.
• WhatsApp integration from $9/seat/month.
• Surveys from $49/month.

5. Zendesk

Best for: Anyone who contacts users on a broad range of channels.

Zendesk is an established Customer Support platform, which includes all the features you’d expect. They claim to be scalable and flexible enough to adapt to any business. They also include a CRM system allowing it to cover some of your Sales needs.

Zendesk Best Features

• A full ticketing system to stay connected with your customers, pulling together all communication channels including email, chat, Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and more.
• Native Knowledge Base support allows you to create articles for self-service support, saving your agents time. 
• Community forums allow your users to create a community amongst themselves, helping each other and suggesting new features for your team.
• Zendesk Talk allows for phone support, meaning you 

“This software allows me to take calls, handle tickets, handle chats and review my internal resources in one place! Different departments have different queues to keep everyone's work separated and with a quick switch of an assignee, you can escalate or deescalate tickets as needed.” - Shari G. on Capterra

Zendesk Pricing

• Support Team: $19/agent/month, the most basic plan.
• Suite Team: $59/agent/month if billed monthly, or $49/agent/month if billed yearly. 50 AI-powered automated answers and a single Help Center.
• Suite Growth: $99/user/month if billed monthly, or $79/user/month if billed yearly. 100 AI-powered automated answers,  multiple Help Centers and SLA management.
• Suite Professional: $125/user/month if billed monthly, or $99/user/month if billed yearly. Includes Conversation routing based on agent skill and HIPAA compliance.
• Suite Enterprise: $199/user/month if billed monthly, or $150/user/month if billed yearly. Most powerful solution.

6. FreshDesk

Best for: Anyone looking for a simple, clean and easy UI or who wants to a fully customizable help widget.

Freshdesk is a Customer Support platform which offers every feature you’ll need, including omnichannel support, automated ticket routing, reports, self service options, SLAs and much more. It has a robust free plan!

FreshDesk Best Features

• An extremely intuitive and simple UI makes getting started very easy.
• Their automations are very useful and powerful, allowing you to save substantial time for your agents.
• As a very well established player in the support software industry, they offer a huge amount of integrations and apps, as well as API access.
• Fully customizable help widget allows you to give your users/customers the exact help they need. Enable them to help themselves with self-service resources, or have them give you the exact details you need when they send a ticket. 

“Freshdesk has a wide range of essential services, including live chat, email, phone, and social media support channels. The software is cloud-based and easy to use, with clever automation capabilities that guarantee things are done easily and quickly, resulting in more efficient corporate operations and a better customer experience.” - Shayla B. on Capterra

FreshDesk Pricing

Split into Support Desk and Omnichannel pricing. Support Desk includes basic support features for chat and email, while Omnichannel opens up other channels.

Support Desk:

• Free forever for up to 10 agents.
• Growth: €15/agent/month, billed annually. €18/agent/month, billed monthly.
• Pro: €49/agent/month, billed annually. €59/agent/month, billed monthly.
• Enterprise: €79/agent/month, billed annually. €95/agent/month, billed monthly.

Omnichannel:

• Growth Omnichannel: €29/agent/month, billed annually. €35/agent/month, billed monthly.
• Pro Omnichannel: €59/agent/month, billed annually. €71/agent/month, billed monthly.
• Enterprise Omnichannel: €99/agent/month, billed annually. €119/agent/month, billed monthly.

7. HubSpot Service Hub

Best for: Anyone who wants to bring together all their different departments under one tool.

Hubspot’s Service Hub is the Customer Service offering from Hubspot. It connects seamlessly with all their other software. With all the features you’d expect from a strong Customer Service platform, including help center, messaging, email, automation, customer feedback, surveys and more, it’s a great option for anyone whether they use other HubSpot products or not.

HubSpot Service Hub Best Features

• HubSpot offers a wide range of other services, which includes a CRM (Sales Hub), Marketing platform, Content Management System and an Operations Hub. If you want company wide consistency, HubSpot can give you it.
• The in-built customer portal gives a great self-service experience to your customers, allowing them to easily keep track of their support conversations.
• You can run surveys and get feedback from your customers on their support experience, making it easy to collect important analytics. These are essential for managing a successful Support team.
• Create ‘playbooks’ which serve as internal guides for your support team—perfect for a growing team which needs to scale quickly and have all processes documented for new members.

“We were already using the CRM features of Hubspot and liked the idea of combining with our service desk. We automatically create tickets from chats, which makes dropping the ball on tickets harder to do. The knowledge base is flexible, and the layout templates allowed us to get on-brand”. - Josh A. on Capterra

HubSpot Service Hub Pricing

• Free forever version includes ticketing and analytics.
• Starter: 2 agents for €41/month, billed annually or €46/month, billed monthly. €21 per extra agent. Builds on free features, adding more possibilities for automation and tracking.
• Professional: 5 agents for €414/month, billed annually or €460/month, billed monthly. €90 per extra agent. Unlocks customer feedback and surveys, along with other more powerful features.
• Enterprise: 10 agents for €1,104/month, which can only be billed annually at €13,248/year. Extra agents are €110/month. The most powerful tools include hierarchical teams and full process customization.

8. Front

Best for: Anyone who wants great automation features and an all-in-one solution.

A ‘customer communication hub’ focused on making sure you improve relationships with your customers. It gives your team all the tools they need to collaborate correctly in an easy-to-use interface which is based on email clients.

Front Best Features

• Automated workflows allow for automatic tagging and organizing of incoming tickets, allowing your team to concentrate on what’s important.
• A great collection of articles outline how others have used Front to automate their processes or create other successful workflows. This resource is well presented and relevant for most use cases.
• As a ‘communication hub’, Front has a huge amount of different uses. Much like HubSpot, you can use it for all aspects of your company, including Sales, Marketing and much more.

“It has a number of very good features for helping teams work together for sales and support. The abilities to share, assign, comment on, snooze and resurface issues makes zero inbox possible. Keeps clutter down and focus on what is most important at the moment.” - John F. on Capterra

Front Pricing

• Starter: $19/agent/month, billed annually. Minimum of 2 agents, and a maximum of 10. Includes chat and basic automations, along with a few integrations (automation or custom plugins).
• Growth: $49/agent/month, billed annually. Minimum of 5 agents. Adds CRM integration, advanced workflows and basic analytics.
• Scale: $99/agent/month, billed annually. Minimum of 10 agents. Unlocks most powerful features including onboarding & solution design, and smart rules.

So how do I choose the best Customer Service Software for me?

This all depends on what you need to achieve, how big your team is, and how deep your pockets are! Generally, you’ll want to start with a simpler, cheaper solution when you’ve just established your product. Once you have an idea of your needs and start to hit some barriers, upgrade to a new tier—or move to another service! It’s a good idea to reconsider your provider every few months, to see if you could be a better fit for someone else!