Best email ticketing system

Streamline your support workflow with email-to-helpdesk ticketing: effortlessly convert customer emails into actionable tickets. Experience seamless support management today and enhance customer satisfaction! 

Switch to ticketingSchedule a free demo

What is an email ticketing system?

An email ticketing system is a way to streamline, optimize and organize your customer communications. It’s a specific type of software that automatically converts multiple customer emails into single tickets. And that makes life much simpler for your help desk agents or customer support team.

As your business scales, a shared inbox can quickly become cluttered, disorganized and difficult to keep track of. With that in mind, the main goal of an email to ticket system is to consolidate different customer emails in a central place. This makes it easier to follow a conversation from start to finish. And it stops urgent customer issues from getting missed.

The right email ticketing software could also speed up your response time since there’s no need to wade through a huge inbox. You can simply assign support tickets to the right people within your team. They can then review all communications with a particular customer at a glance.

The best ticketing email systems optimize the structure and workflow of customer service teams with the help of automation, reporting, analytics and tagging. But their impact can stretch into other departments too. Think finance, accounting and IT, for example.

Ultimately, it’s all about removing the heavy lifting from customer communications, freeing up your teams to work their magic and cut down on admin. The long-term benefits can include a more streamlined way of working and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Key features of email ticketing software

Each email-based ticketing system is different, offering a variety of unique features and benefits. However, some common things to look out for include:

Ticket conversion and management

This type of software offers the functionality to convert customer emails into unique tickets. It ensures all communications from a particular customer appear in one place, making tracking much clearer.

Easy email integration

Your system should work with common email applications like Outlook and Gmail. This allows support agents to respond to customer queries, no matter which app they prefer.

Automated ticket assignment

You may have the ability to set up customizable rules that automatically assign certain tickets to team members. For example, your routing rules could match technical queries with agents that have a particular skill or specialism. Alternatively, routing could simply be set up so that the next available agent answers the query.

Analytics and reporting tools

Response times and customer satisfaction levels are key areas to monitor when gauging your team’s performance. The right ticketing system can generate automated reports on these and other metrics. You should also be able to view key metrics in real time.

Joined-up thinking

It’s often possible to integrate your ticketing software with other vital systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and social media tools.

Creating a knowledge base

In some cases, you might have the opportunity to develop a self-service knowledge base. This is a place where customers can find FAQs and helpful articles, potentially removing the need to send an email query.

Why are email ticketing systems better for customer support?

An email ticketing system or email helpdesk software automatically converts incoming emails into tickets that are easy to track, monitor, and manage. 

With a helpdesk ticketing system, you’ll have customizable inbox views, logins for each member of your team, and still remove the chances of two agents picking up the same customer email, or missing emails altogether without a proper tracking mechanism.

The main advantage is that an email ticketing system brings clarity about the owner, type, status, and priority of the ticket to everyone in the team. This helps keep all your customer support agents on the same page, improves transparency, and ensures that no customer conversation slips through the cracks.

What are the biggest advantages of deploying an email ticketing system?

Email helpdesk ticketing software can cut customer waiting times and make your operations more transparent. Here are some of the main advantages when deploying these systems:

A better-organized helpdesk

A shared customer service inbox can quickly become chaotic. Team members could miss emails, or even respond to queries that have already been answered. Meanwhile, managers may lack the oversight to see when customer issues have been resolved and cases closed.

Email helpdesk software overcomes these problems through streamlining and consolidation. Each customer query is given a unique numbered ticket, making their journey simpler to trace. Tickets can also be assigned automatically, giving support agents ownership and preventing duplication.

Saving valuable time

Response times are vital in the world of customer service. Long waiting times could lead to frustration and even damage trust in your brand.

Ticketing automation means your team won’t have to check through multiple folders to find the latest response to a customer. With everything in one place, they should be able to reply more quickly and get through extra cases each day.

Closer collaboration

Automatic routing rules can ensure customer queries are directed to the most relevant or knowledgeable person. Tagging could also help you to break down barriers between different departments. For example, by passing on a query to someone with more experience.

Stronger context

With lots of customer emails flying around, it can prove tricky for helpdesk agents to understand the full context. What’s more, customers may feel resentful if they have to explain the full situation every time they talk to a new team member.

Support tickets can remove this danger by gathering all a customer’s key details and communications in one place.

Easier to measure success

Real-time analytics and reporting mean managers are no longer in the dark when reviewing key performance indicators. Ticketing systems can provide hard data and evidence to show how a team is progressing.

Why do shared inboxes fail?

Using an email inbox for customer support is difficult. You require complex folder structures or confusing color-coded tags to track issues, and as the number of support requests increases, collaboration becomes a nightmare.

Before long, managing multiple mailboxes for different teams and products causes your efficiency to take a hit. You might end up missing customer conversations that need your immediate attention, leading to dents in your customers’ satisfaction.

What are the benefits of moving from a shared inbox to email helpdesk software like Freshdesk?

Freshdesk helps you streamline email and social media ticket management, improve customer satisfaction, and increase agent productivity.

Improve support efficiency

Tasks like routing, tagging, or following up on support tickets can take up a lot of time and effort when done manually. You can free up your support team's time by automating these tasks with customizable workflow automation rules that run on different parameters and agent availability. Agents get notified when a ticket has been assigned, updated, or is nearing SLA deadlines, enabling them to act fast and offer timely support. Freshdesk also helps ensure that no two agents end up working on the same ticket with agent collision detection.

Cut down on repetitive work

Typing out the same messages over and over again can feel like rote work after a point. Freshdesk enables you to answer frequently asked questions in a few clicks using solution articles, canned responses, or support email templates.

Collaborate to resolve issues faster

Customer service teams need to work within and across other teams to resolve certain issues. On Freshdesk, you can collaborate even as you work on tickets, with the in-built discussion pane that enables the people looped in to gather context of the customer issue quickly. You can even drop notes on tickets to share progress or log your updates for future reference.

Customers with self-service

Most customers today prefer finding answers on their own over speaking to an agent. Empower your customers to help themselves by publishing a detailed knowledge base with FAQs and help guides. An exhaustive knowledge base can help you deflect up to 60% of customer service requests and reduce agent workload. Additionally, you can set up user community forums or discussion boards where customers can help one another.

Offer assistance with 100% context

In today’s world, context is king – customers hate having to repeat themselves and expect you to have relevant information about their order history, and previous interactions. Freshdesk offers individual timelines for every customer, giving you full context and history of conversations they’ve had with your representatives, enabling them to create a better customer experience. Freshdesk also stops agents from sending replies to customers without getting the full picture and the recent developments.

Measure performance with intuitive reporting

Reporting and analytics are essential to identify loopholes in your customer service strategy. Track the right metrics to understand how quickly your team resolves issues or when they’re the busiest using Freshdesk’s one-click reports. Get a bird’s-eye view of your customer service using live dashboards that offer real-time insights on team performance and customer satisfaction.

What are the best practices for using an email ticketing system?

Choosing the right email ticketing system for your business is just the beginning. Here are some best-practice tips to ensure your customer support advisors get the most from it.

1. Embrace automation features

An email-based ticketing system offers plenty of room for automation. Tagging, canned responses and routing can easily be automated to save time and resources. They could also boost morale within your team by removing repetitive, menial tasks from people’s day-to-day routines.

2. Prioritize and order customer emails

Email helpdesk software makes it easy to categorize and order customer queries. Breaking things down into higher and lower-priority tickets should improve the focus of team members. It could ultimately create a more logical, linear workflow.

3. Make effective use of data

The right software will provide a variety of useful data at your fingertips. Take full advantage of analytics and reports to see where your team is outperforming – or lagging.

For example, if your average response time feels too long, it may be worth digging into the reasons why or considering a centralized knowledge base.

4. Put your customers first

In the rush to set up a state-of-the-art ticketing email system, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters: your customers. Surveys and feedback forms could give you direct insights into their engagement and satisfaction levels.

Regularly review their engagement with your customer service systems. If improvements are needed, it’ll arm you with real-world knowledge of the customer experience.

5. Remember your SLA commitments

Email ticketing can help you to stay within your service level agreement (SLA). This sets out the level of service customers can expect from your business. Support tickets can make it easier to identify cases where you risk breaching your SLA obligations.

Learn more about ticketing best practices

Is it the right time to upgrade to email ticketing software?

Think of an email ticketing system as an efficient and flexible email management solution that offers immediate benefits and continues to grow in value in the long term. 

In the short run, you can bring a method to the madness and improve efficiency. And in the long haul, you can scale your customer service and keep up with evolving customer demands and growing business needs without shifting tools again.

Plus, you get the added benefits of integrating with a wide selection of apps, including CRM, invoicing software, and collaboration tools, to better extend Freshdesk’s capabilities and integrate it into your daily workflow.

Migrating from Gmail or Outlook to Freshdesk can be done seamlessly. Your agents can get all the context they need without having to manually forward older threads to Freshdesk.

With Freshdesk’s agent-friendly UI, transparent pricing, and helpful customer service team, you really have nothing to worry about.

What factors should you consider before investing in an email ticketing system?

Key factors to consider before purchasing email helpdesk software include:

  • Pricing. What costs will you need to budget for? Does the cheapest software offer all the features you require?

  • User-friendly features. How easy will it be for your staff to learn the system? Will they need extensive training or is it intuitive?

  • Ability to request feedback. How straightforward is the customer communication process? For example, will you be able to insert feedback requests and surveys into your responses?

  • Security. Does the system offer guarantees over data security? How will it prevent hacking attempts?

Find out more about helpdesk software

How do email ticketing systems work?

Email ticketing systems track, prioritize, and follow up on customer requests from one place. This will help your support team deliver faster, more efficient customer support.

With an email ticketing system like Freshdesk, you can:

Assign ownership. Each inquiry gets assigned as a ticket in Freshdesk to a member of your team. They become the owner of the ticket and will be responsible for its course of action.

Prioritize tickets. Get each ticket prioritized based on their exigency into four categories – Urgent, High, Medium, and Low.

Set deadlines. Set standards of performance for each inquiry that comes in. Service level agreements (SLAs) act as customized timers for each inquiry. 

Engage on any channel. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, phone, chat, messaging (WhatsApp), or even through your website. Get a consolidated view of all customer inquiries.

Try our email ticketing system

For free. No credit card required.

Schedule a free demo

Top 5 email to helpdesk ticketing systems in 2024

1. Freshdesk

Key features

  • Team inbox

  • Agent collision detection

  • SLA management

  • Canned responses

  • Scenario automation

Pros of Freshdesk

  • Promotes collaboration between teams

  • Ability to link up related tickets

  • Automatically assigns tickets to team members

  • Creates customer knowledge bases

  • Generates curated reports

2. Help Scout

Key features

  • Collision detection

  • Visual cues to avoid duplicate work

  • Saved email templates offer standard responses

  • Reporting dashboards help to review productivity

  • Knowledge base builder

Pros and cons of Help Scout

  • Short-term trials are available

  • High customer retention

  • No longer offers a free plan

3. Zoho Desk

Key features

  • Automatic suggestions when writing emails

  • Save time with templates and shortcuts

  • Keeps all customer interactions in one place

  • Allows private comments and tagging

  • Offers a mobile app

Pros and cons of Zoho Desk

  • Ability to set up SLAs

  • Provides pocket-sized charts of key metrics

  • Prices could be higher for advanced customization capabilities

4. Kayako

Key features

  • Option to create a self-help knowledge base

  • Ability to connect with hundreds of apps

  • Create SLA notifications

  • Smart routing to designated agents

  • Opportunity to add live chat features

Pros and cons of Kayako

  • 14-day free trials available

  • Goes beyond emails by flagging other customer interactions

  • Lacks customer satisfaction surveys and social media keyword filters

5. Zendesk

Key features

  • All customer information stays in a single place

  • Customize views based on ticket status, assignee and other factors

  • Build in scheduled business hours, SLAs and time tracking

  • Create standard responses to common queries

  • Simple interface

Pros and cons of Zendesk

  • Demo and free trials available

  • Offers built-in best practices

  • Pricing may take time to navigate

Ready to move from chaos to control?

Sign up for free today and try Freshdesk for yourself!

Start free trialRequest demo

Frequently asked questions about email ticketing systems

Does Google have an email ticketing system?

No, Google is not natively built to act as a ticketing system. You can customize your Gmail inbox to support your customers when you start out. However, the solution is neither scalable nor efficient when your clients increase and your support team expands as well.

Why should you use email helpdesk software?

Email helpdesk software enables you to respond to all your customer queries quickly from one place without missing any support requests. You can also deploy self-service options and allow your team to collaborate on resolving customer issues efficiently.

When to switch from an inbox to an email ticketing system?

When you have a handful of customers, you might be using your Gmail or Outlook account to support their requests. But as your business grows and the volume of requests increases, you might start noticing delays or slips in handling customer queries. That’s your cue to switch to a simple email ticketing system.

How do you convert an email into a ticket?

When your customers connect with agents via emails, web chat, or social media, a shared inbox software streamlines all communication into one inbox. This allows your support agents to collaborate and respond to emails in an organized and timely manner.

Are there any free email ticketing systems available?

Yes, the forever free plan of Freshdesk allows you to convert and track support emails as tickets. It is available for free for up to 10 agents.

Why is an email ticketing system important?

An email ticketing system can prove important when it comes to organizing and streamlining your customer communications. By consolidating all the details about a particular query in a single place, it could save you time and avoid duplicated work. Customer response times might also fall.

Why are email ticketing systems better for customer support?

Email ticketing systems can deliver better customer support due to their automated approach. Customer emails can be converted into tickets automatically and efficiently assigned to the right support agent. Since all the details about the query are in one place, it’s easy for the agent to get the full context.