Customer service software lets businesses engage their customers, receive and track inquiries, and improve the delivery of their services. The best products will be affordable and come with a vast set of ticketing tools, features for monitoring service performance, and communication channels like email, live chat, text, phone, and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Based on our evaluation, we’ve identified the seven best customer service software for small business:
- Best customer support software for managing clients: Bitrix24
- Best free customer support platform: Freshdesk
- Excellent option for monitoring service performance: Zoho Desk
- Best self-service resources for customers: LiveAgent
- Great for engaging customers on digital channels: Help Scout
- Most user-friendly: HubSpot Service Hub
- Excellent for managing a call center: RingCentral Contact Center
Best Customer Service Software for Small Business Compared
Provider | Top Customer Service Use Cases | Our Software Rating Out of 5 | |
---|---|---|---|
Free to $49 per month (five users) |
| 4.83 | |
Free to $15 |
| 4.69 | |
Free to $7 |
| 4.51 | |
Free to $9 |
| 4.35 | |
$20 |
| 4.34 | |
Free to $18 per month (two users) |
| 4.21 | |
Contact for pricing |
| 3.88 | |
Bitrix24: Best for Client Management
Pros
- Solid free plan available for unlimited users and customer queue management from the contact center
- Offers unique project management features for businesses that deliver services via projects
- Robust contact center with a built-in phone system, email integration, and live chat communications
Cons
- Reporting performance for customer service operations requires Standard plan
- Bulk email and text communications to give a large number of customers updates gets expensive, starting at $99 per month
- Not an intuitive platform; users find a steep learning curve is required
- You are a client-based business: Bitrix24 is a sales customer relationship management (CRM) software that also has customer service tools for small businesses, such as inquiry queue management, a contact center, and activity tracking. It’s primarily great for client-based businesses that sell services to other businesses or consumers. The system has a dedicated client profile module for storing contact data, tracking projects, monitoring account activity, and scheduling video conference calls.
- You need a complete contact center to handle support: As one of the top customer service platforms, Bitrix24 has a robust contact center system to receive inquiries and communicate with customers. The channels available include a phone system, email, live chat, video calling, and web form submission all manageable from the CRM.
- You need an easy-to-use customer support system: Bitrix24 has a lot of modules in its system to handle sales, marketing, service, operations, projects, human resources, and other business functions. Additionally, the pages often contain large amounts of buttons and menu options—ultimately making the platform tricky to learn and navigate.
- Alternative: HubSpot Service Hub is the best customer service platform for small businesses that prioritize ease of use in software.
- You want more robust ticketing tools: While Bitrix24 does have a queue system to receive and track customer inquiries, it’s limited mostly to managing communications as opposed to actual issues. It doesn’t offer more advanced ticket management capabilities like cloning, auto-assignment, splitting, or priority setting.
Bitrix24 Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Bitrix24 offers a 30-day free trial on paid plans. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
Bitrix24 is a great option for bundling customer support tools in a sales customer relationship management (CRM) system. Any service-based business can get tons of value from the client profiles, project management, and activity-tracking capabilities of this platform. We also like how the contact center is integrated into the system to easily receive inquiries and maintain customer conversations from the same place you’re closing deals, storing data, and collaborating on customer projects.
Freshdesk: Best Free Software for Customer Service
Pros
- Free plan that has a highly robust ticket management system
- Great customer service software for getting insights on operational performance, ticketing trends, and customer satisfaction
- Service level agreement (SLA) tracking is included on Growth plan to ensure service expectations are delivered by your team
Cons
- Artificial intelligence (AI) features are available, but locked in the Enterprise plan
- Users can’t create and distribute customer surveys until Pro plan
- Separate product from the CRM; users must subscribe to native software for sales features
- You’re looking for the best free small business customer service platform: Any small business seeking a free option need look no further than Freshdesk. The freemium plan allows up to 10 agents and comes with ticket management tools, including email-to-ticket, merge, activity tracking, tagging, and priority setting. You can also engage customers via email, live chat, and Facebook, and run ticket automations at no cost.
- You want a solid tool to get insights on your service operation: Starting on the Free plan, users get access to solid dashboard reporting tools to track ticket volume trends. These capabilities slowly expand on the paid plans to time tracking in ticket resolution, customer survey metrics, and how efficient customer service agents or teams are at handling inquiries.
- You need low-cost customer survey tools: While Freshdesk has customer surveying capabilities, these aren’t available until the Pro plan for $49 per user, per month.
- Alternative: Zoho Desk starts offering customer satisfaction surveys for just $7 per user, per month.
- You want more affordable artificial intelligence (AI) features: AI in customer service lets you run in-depth analysis on your data and put tasks on auto-pilot, such as email drafting or customer communications via AI chatbots, by having a computer program do it for you. While Freshdesk does have these capabilities, they don’t start until the Enterprise plan for $79 per user, per month.
- Alternative: Help Scout comes with an AI assist tool to help craft customer responses for just $20 per user, per month, and AI for summarizing customer conversations for just $40 per user, per month. If analytics are your priority, we recommend Zoho Desk which offers Zia for analytics for $40 per user, per month.
Freshdesk Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per user, per month breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Freshdesk offers a 21-day free trial on paid plans. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
There is always a market for the best “free” solution option, especially with customer service software. Freshdesk, primarily thanks to its robust ticketing system and wide range of support channels, is the top free option available. Additionally, the free ticket creation automations, collaboration tools, and dashboard reporting of ticket volume trends can add substantial value to a small business.
Zoho Desk: Best Customer Support Tool for Performance Monitoring
Pros
- Free plan that includes service level agreement (SLA) monitoring
- Relatively low-cost dashboard features for customer happiness and ticketing performance for just $7 per month
- Relatively low-cost and scalable plans with artificial intelligence (AI) tools starting at just $40 per user, per month
Cons
- Relatively expensive live chat communications
- Poor product usability ratings; decent learning curve required due to the many features and clunky interface
- Telephone channel not included until Professional plan
- You primarily need insights for your service operation: Zoho Desk is an excellent customer intelligence platform and operational analysis tool in that you can get tons of data insights to improve service offerings. It comes with low-cost customer surveying and satisfaction monitoring that starts at just $7 per user, per month. There’s also ticket status, agent productivity, knowledge base usage, and ticket resolution reporting all on the low-tiered plans.
- You want free service level agreement (SLA) tracking tools: While most customer services software tools will include SLA tracking on the high-tiered plans, Zoho starts offering basic functions for $0 per month. On the free plan, you can automatically monitor tickets to find those that demand high priority support based on whether they’re falling out of line with SLAs or contractual agreements.
- You need a more intuitive system for your customer service solutions: One issue with the Zoho products, including Zoho Desk, is that the interface often appears clunky and somewhat outdated—making it hard to navigate and operate.
- Alternative: If you want the best customer service software for a small business in terms of user experience and system operability, we recommend HubSpot Service Hub.
- You want more affordable live chat communication features: While Zoho Desk can be used as a multi-faceted contact center, the live chat engagement features are relatively expensive compared to other customer service providers—starting at $40 per user, per month.
Zoho Desk Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per user, per month breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Zoho Desk offers a 15-day free trial on paid plans. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
Performance monitoring in your service operation is vital for goal tracking, coaching, and capacity planning. Zoho Desk is an excellent platform for ensuring customer satisfaction remains high and that your agents are meeting their job requirements. These features are not only advanced—but they’re cost-effective, for which a majority of analytics can be acquired on the Free and low-tiered plans.
LiveAgent: Best for Providing Self-service Resources to Customers
Pros
- Lots of low-cost automation tools like canned responses and automated ticketing workflows
- Free plan includes most of the ticket management functionality, like merge, transfer, split, notes, and tagging
- Excellent features for providing self-service resources to customers, like a knowledge base, FAQ page, and community forum
Cons
- Service level agreement (SLA) tracking requires Medium Business plan
- Most reporting features aren’t available until higher-tiered plans
- Strictly a customer service platform; does not sales CRM features or have a native CRM integration
- You want to deploy a lot of self-service resources to your customers: When evaluating our list of customer service software providers, LiveAgent sets itself apart for its self-service portal features. Starting on the Free plan, you can create and publish a knowledge base with helpful articles, an FAQ page with answers to common questions, and a community forum for customers to interact and connect with one another.
- You need a robust ticketing solution: LiveAgent is a specialty customer service software that invests a lot into a key feature for providing top-notch service—ticketing. Users can create new tickets from communication channels and web forms, as well as complete complex functions, like ticket merge, split, tagging, filtering, notes, history tracking, transfer, time tracking, and many others.
- You need lower-priced SLA features: Service level agreement (SLA) tracking is vital to ensuring your service delivery is in line with contractual requirements. LiveAgent, unfortunately, does not start offering SLA until the Medium business plan for $29 per user, per month.
- Alternative: Zoho Desk is the best option for cost-friendly SLA management that has basic functions starting on the Free plan, plus more expanded options on the Express and Standard plan for $7 or $14 per user, per month.
- You want a product with a native CRM connection: Using a customer relationship manager (CRM) for customer service or a customer service software that offers a native integration lets you seamlessly keep sales and support data in sync with one another and facilitate collaboration—letting you better align your business functions. LiveAgent, unfortunately, is a specialty software that only offers third-party integration with CRMs.
- Alternative: Bitrix24 is the best option if you want to skip a step and adopt a CRM that has customer service features, while Freshdesk, Zoho Desk, and HubSpot Service Hub all have native integrations with sales CRMs as well as marketing platforms.
LiveAgent Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per user, per month breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Prices above only show the small and medium sized business plans. They also offer an Enterprise plan for $69 per user, per month. LiveAgent offers a 30-day free trial on paid plans. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
Many of today’s customers prefer self-service resources as a way to resolve their billing, product, or experience issues. That said, LiveAgent can be your single source of providing both human support and guided resources, like a knowledge base, FAQ page, and community forum. The specialty tools are available for Free, and its paid plans can help an operation grow smoothly with its capacity needs.
Help Scout: Best for Communicating With Customers on Digital Channels
Pros
- Great system for engaging and tracking conversations on digital channels, such as email and social media platforms
- Comes with unique artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help craft customer responses and summarize long conversations
- Solid set of knowledge base and website widget management tools to automate support through self-service
Cons
- Ticketing system is limited to just tracking email, live chat, or social media conversations in an inbox
- Lacks telephonic contact center features
- No free plan
- You exclusively want to provide digital customer support: Help Scout lets you provide an excellent digital support experience to your customers. It is equipped with a contact center with email, live chat, and social media channels and lets you centralize your conversations in a single inbox to help track, assign, and collaborate on service inquiries.
- You want to adopt AI and automation in your service operations: Help Scout stands out as a great solution to automating customer service. First off, teams can use AI to craft service responses for your reps and summarize support conversations. It also has excellent features for administering self-service resources to customers like a knowledge base or website content pages. Additionally, users can deploy easy-to-use workflow automation to keep agents on track and streamline resolutions.
- You want a more robust ticketing system: Help Scout is mostly a digital contact center in that all inquiries come in the form of “conversations” as opposed to tickets.
- You need a freemium customer care software: Help Scout, unfortunately, does not offer a free-forever plan to its users to try out the features long term in a risk-free environment.
- Alternative: Freshdesk is the best overall service software in terms of freemium options. HubSpot Service Hub is another solid option if you want great email tools to stay connected with customers, while Bitrix24 is excellent for free client profile tracking capabilities.
Help Scout Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per user, per month breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Help Scout offers a 15-day free trial on paid plans. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
Help Scout has fully adapted to customer preferences of seeking support via email, live chat, and social media channels. We like the centralized conversational inbox for teams to collaborate and stay on top of customer issues in real time. We also can’t overlook the sophistication of the platform through its unique artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and workflow automation options.
HubSpot Service Hub: Best for Ease of Use
Pros
- Highly rated for intuitiveness of system design; easy to learn, operate, and navigate
- Unique invoicing and payment processing tools included
- Free plan available for unlimited users with ticket management, email and live chat engagement, and meeting scheduling
Cons
- Most advanced features like SLA and knowledge base management, surveying, and custom reports require Professional plan
- Limited automation on low-tiers; users are restricted to just auto-emailing customers and getting notifications for ticket status updates
- Automated ticket routing gets expensive, starting at $450 per month
- You need highly intuitive customer service management software: HubSpot is renowned for creating software tools that are easy to set up, learn, and operate. Additionally, the interface is crafted using a modern design and best-in-class user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) principles, which make it a seamless experience while navigating the system—especially when compared to other products on this list. That said, it’s the perfect option for absolute beginners who need clean, simplified software.
- You want a system that can handle revenue collection: Certain businesses may find invoicing and payment processing to be a bottleneck in their customer service operation. If that’s the case, HubSpot Service Hub is the best solution for you. It has excellent features for creating one-time or recurring invoices, and also offers an integration with Stripe and built-in automated clearing house (ACH) to collect and track payments from a single interface.
- You want more affordable knowledge base management features: HubSpot Service Hub, unfortunately, gets relatively expensive for certain service features such as service level agreement (SLA) tracking, surveying, and most notably, creating a self-service knowledge base. These all start on the Professional plan for $450 per month.
- Alternative: LiveAgent lets you administer a knowledge base, community forum, and FAQ pages for free.
- You need better automation capabilities for a lower cost: Another expensive feature for HubSpot is the automation. While you can get basic workflows like sending out customer emails or receiving notifications based on ticket status changes for just $18 per month, more advanced functions like ticket creation and assignment, automated task management, and recurring emails for ticket activity require the Professional plan.
- Alternative: Zoho Desk has highly customizable automation to meet any workflow starting at just $7 per user, per month.
HubSpot Service Hub Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Each plan offers a 14-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
**Pricing uses the monthly Service Hub costs for individuals and small teams. The provider also offers Enterprise-level products for larger service teams and the CRM Suite, which includes sales, marketing, customer service, content management system (CMS), and operations software in one product for a higher price.
Our Expert Opinion
Software features are rendered useless if users aren’t able to learn and operate them. HubSpot Service Hub lets you quickly get comfortable with your customer service software by leveraging all the industry best practices for user experience management and interface design. The system looks modern, with simple menu options and a calming color scheme for superb navigability.
RingCentral Contact Center: Best Call Center Features
Pros
- Highly sophisticated call center features with advanced dialing, interactive voice response (IVR), and call queue management
- System comes with dozens of integration options and built-in communications to provide customer support on many channels
- Lots of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to automate service flows and get key insights
Cons
- Lacks transparent pricing
- Tough system for learning and operating the features
- Does not offer a free plan
Features
- You primarily run as a call center: RingCentral is primarily a voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone solution for small businesses to handle calls in the system. That said, it’s able to provide highly sophisticated call center features that other providers on this list cannot. Teams can send prerecorded messages to customers, run voice-to-text on voicemails, generate call transcriptions or recordings, and do dial previews and predictive dialing.
- You want to leverage lots of AI for your service team: When choosing a help desk software, you may prioritize emerging tools like artificial intelligence (AI). RingCentral Contact Center is one of the leaders that has embraced AI for more than just chatbots. The system uses virtual AI assistants to also provide in-the-moment suggestions during conversations, conversation summaries, conversational notes and keywords, and give insights on knowledge base resources you should add.
- You need a customer service software with free plan options: Because of its advanced features and focus on supporting larger service teams, RingCentral Contact Center does not offer a free-forever plan to its users.
- Alternative: Freshdesk is the best alternative for freemium customer service software—offering email, Facebook, and live chat communications, ticketing, knowledge base management, and ticket volume reporting all at no cost.
- You want a more intuitive support platform: RingCentral Contact Center performs poorly in usability ratings as users find that a steep learning curve is required, particularly when operating its contact center features.
- Alternative: For the best user experience and top customer service software for ease of use, we recommend HubSpot Service Hub.
RingCentral Contact Center Monthly Pricing Plans*
*RingCentral offers a 14-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
RingCentral Contact Center is a great platform for when you’re ready to digitally transform and scale your support operation. It has the most sophisticated telephonic capabilities, making it the best call center option. These advanced features pair nicely with the innovative uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in a customer service operation to always keep your business ahead of the competition.
Visit RingCentral Contact Center
How We Evaluated the Best Customer Service Software for Small Business
To determine the best customer service system, we evaluated the specific features relevant to assisting and communicating with customers. For instance, a ticketing system lets you track incoming inquiries or issues while a contact center lets you engage customers via phone, email, and live chat. We also looked at other critical product attributes, including price, available third-party integrations, product ease of use, and customer support availability by the provider.
The tabs below offer insight into our evaluation process of the best customer service management software:
25% of Overall Score
We first looked at overall features crucial to any business software, regardless of its primary use case or function served. Workflow management tools, for example, let you track tasks, automate processes, and collaborate with team members within the customer support platform. We also wanted to see mobile customer service functionality, a wide range of third-party integrations, and robust reporting and analytics tools available.
25% of Overall Score
We looked at niche features specifically useful for customer service teams. Ticket management, for instance, lets you track and resolve customer inquiries as they come in. We also evaluated the range of support channels available in the product’s contact center, such as email, live chat, text, phone, or artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Finally, we evaluated capabilities for monitoring service performance metrics and storing customer contact information.
20% of Overall Score
Pricing considered the costs of the subscription plans for the customer service software products. We wanted to see freemium, low-priced, and scalable options available. We also considered the billing flexibility in terms of being able to save on price by subscribing annually.
15% of Overall Score
Extensive user support helps prevent poor experiences while operating these customer service software products. We wanted to see each provider offer channel availability via phone, email, and live chat at any time of the day so you can access them 24×7 or during extended business hours. We also considered the self-service resources available, like a community forum and knowledge base articles.
15% of Overall Score
In addition to firsthand experience with these customer service management platforms, we evaluated what actual users say about each product according to online reviews. This allowed us to see how real users felt about the product in terms of features and whether it’s worth the price paid. It also helped us better evaluate the product usability in terms of setting up, operating, and navigating the software system.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Customer service software helps businesses provide excellent support to their customers. It has tools for receiving and tracking tickets, creating self-service resources for customers, and managing conversations via phone, email, live chat, chatbot, text, or social media channels. These products will also include data management features for storing and tracking information on their customers, plus performance reporting on service activity.
Customer service can be best managed using customer service, help desk, or contact center software. You can also use a CRM solution, like Bitrix24, that comes with service tools such as queue and conversation management and client profile storage. You essentially want to find any software that lets you manage support tickets, communicate with customers, and track activity in your service operation.
While there’s no clear data to identify the most popular customer support software, many providers have products that are highly acclaimed and adopted by small businesses. HubSpot’s Service Hub, Zoho’s Zoho Desk, and Freshworks’ Freshdesk, for example, are all popular business software providers with solid service platforms.
Bottom Line
The best customer service software for small businesses offer centralized systems to manage tickets, store customer data, engage customers, and track performance metrics. While we ranked Bitrix24 as the best overall product for its great client profile and contact center modules, other providers could be a better choice based on your needs. HubSpot Service Hub, for example, is great for ease of use while Freshdesk offers the best freemium software option.