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Your support team already uses Slack for everything. The real question is no longer if you should use it, but how to manage it efficiently without chaos.
Many tools and helpdesks now work inside Slack to help with this. They can route tickets, track response times, and connect to your ticketing tools.
We've picked 6 of the best Slack tools for customer support. They help you bring order, speed up replies, and give your team and customers the clarity they need.
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What To Look for in a Customer Support Tool for Slack?
Before you choose a tool, take a moment to think about what is truly important. The best Slack support tools do more than just send alerts. They make your team's work process smoother, faster, and easier for everyone to see. Here is what you should look for.
- Works inside Slack: The tool should let you do everything, like reply or assign a ticket, without leaving Slack.
- Organizes requests: It should turn messy messages into organized tasks. It can assign them automatically and filter out the noise.
- Syncs with other tools: It must connect and update both ways with your other software, like Zendesk or Jira, in real time.
- Uses automation: Look for features that automatically sort requests, send reminders, and flag late replies.
- Provides reports: You need clear dashboards to see your team's response times and performance.
- Helps teamwork: The tool should make it easy to involve other teammates or escalate issues. You should not lose the conversation history.
- Is secure: It must have strong safety measures. This is especially important if you handle customer data in shared channels.
- Is easy to set up: Choose a tool that your team can start using quickly. It should not need a complicated setup.
- Grows with you: Check that the tool's pricing and limits make sense as your team gets bigger and busier.
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6 Best Tools in Slack for Customer Support Teams
1. ClearFeed
ClearFeed is a conversational support platform specifically built for teams that support their customers and employees on Slack. It can be used to support both internal teams within an organization on Slack and external customers via Slack Connect channels.
Recommended for
- B2B SaaS companies that use Slack for customer support.
- Support teams that want to respond from Slack to customer emails and web chat.
- Support teams that want to integrate existing ticketing systems into Slack.
- Support teams looking for streamlined escalation flows to engineering within Slack.
Key Features & Benefits
- Shared Queue Management: Consolidates and prioritizes customer requests across multiple Slack channels, making it easier for teams to manage interactions and resolve issues efficiently.
- Ticket Conversion: Convert Slack threads into support tickets with a single click (either natively in ClearFeed or via systems like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Salesforce Service Hub).
- Triage Channels: Organize customer requests in dedicated triage channels for better collaboration and faster resolution.
- AI-Powered SLA Alerts: ClearFeed uses AI to detect urgent issues and alert teams before service-level agreement breaches occur, ensuring timely responses.
- GPT-Powered Virtual Agent: Automates responses to common customer queries using indexed knowledge bases and documentation, improving first-contact resolution.
- Multi-Channel Support: Handle customer requests across Slack, Email, Web Chat, and the Support Portal, ensuring unified communication through a single platform.
- Analytics & Insights: Provides metrics on response times, closure rates, and customer satisfaction (CSAT), helping teams improve service delivery.
- Fast Setup & Implementation: Known for its easy setup and fast implementation, it is ideal for teams that need quick deployment.
- ‍Customizable Workflows: Enables automation of processes, such as sending alerts or creating tickets, to handle operations efficiently.
Pricing
ClearFeed prices are flexible and based on usage (channels) or Agents. They also offer a 15% discount on an annual subscription. It offers two pricing models: agent-based and usage-based. Agent-based pricing starts at $24/month/agent, whereas usage-based pricing starts at $40/month for 10 channels and 100 tickets.
Add-ons: AI Pack starts at $20.
Pros
- Offers a free trialÂ
- Transparent and simple tiered pricing
- Unlimited custom fields in forms in the professional and enterprise tiers
- Pay-as-you-go pricing for additional channels
Cons
- Ticket limits could be restrictive for some teams
- Add-ons like GPT Answers don't have volume discounts
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2. Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides solutions to help businesses deliver exceptional customer support across channels like messaging, chat, phone, and self-service.
Recommended for
- Small, medium, and large businesses across industries looking to improve their customer service capabilities and customer satisfaction.
- Businesses that want a scalable omnichannel customer service solution.
- Businesses that value building meaningful customer relationships through personalized service.
Key Features & Benefits
- Integrates various communication channels (email, web, phone, chat, social media) into a single system.
- Centralizes all customer interactions for efficient tracking and resolution.
- Offers AI-powered chatbots, knowledge bases, and community forums for 24/7 support.
- Provides real-time data and customizable dashboards, and offers over 20 pre-built templates and dashboards.
- Works well with popular tools like Salesforce and Google Apps.
Pricing
Zendesk Support Suite provides four main tiers:
- Support Team: $19 per agent/month
- Suite Team: $55 per agent/month
- Suite Professional: $115 per agent/month
- Suite Enterprise: $169 per agent/month
Pros
- Flexible pricing tiers to fit different business needs and sizes
- Month-to-month billing available
- Free trial to test out the product
- Thousands of integrations are available
- Scales to support large enterprises
- 24/7 customer support
Cons
- Can get pricey at higher tiers for larger teams
- Add-ons increase costs further
- Contract and minimums may apply for enterprise plans
- Advanced features like custom objects, sandbox, etc., are only available at higher tiers
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3. Intercom
Intercom is a customer service software company that provides an AI-powered platform to support agents and leaders. Their products include an inbox, an AI assistant, tickets, and phone support.
Recommended for
Customer service and support teams at mid-market to enterprise companies across industries like financial services, e-commerce, software, and healthcare.
Key Features & Benefits
- Resolves customer queries instantly across channels with accurate, conversational responses​.
- Routes all customer conversations from email, phone, and chat into a unified inbox​.
- Provides AI-generated expert answers, boosting agent productivity​.
- Manages complex support queries with ticketing​.
- Troubleshoots customer issues faster with integrated phone and video support​.
- AI-driven insights and customizable reports for improved decision-making​.
- Automates routine tasks with triggers, conditions, and rules​.
- Reduces support volume with proactive messaging and notifications​.
- Improves team efficiency with tailored inbox views and conversation tracking​.
Pricing
- Intercom offers three main plans:
- Essential: $29 per seat/month (billed annually)
- Advanced: $85 per seat/month (billed annually)
- Expert: $132 per seat/month (billed annually)
- All plans include access to core features such as the shared inbox, AI Agent, ticketing system, and help center.
- Higher-tier plans offer additional features like advanced automation, multiple team inboxes, and enhanced security options.
- There's a Proactive Support Plus add-on available for $99/month that includes advanced in-app and outbound support features.
- Usage-based pricing applies to certain features:
- Fin AI Agent: $0.99 per resolution
- WhatsApp: Charged per conversation
- SMS: Charged per message sent/received
- Email campaigns: Charged per email sent
- Intercom offers a 90% discount for startups through its "Intercom for Startups" program
Pros
- Pay only for what you use
- Integrated into Intercom's existing messaging platform
- Free tier available
Cons
- Potentially costly for high call volume businesses
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4. HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub provides an all-in-one customer platform with software for marketing, sales, and customer service. Their software aims to help businesses grow better by unifying data, teams, and tools to deliver a personalized customer experience.
Recommended for
- Small to mid-sized businesses looking to scale and improve the efficiency of marketing, sales, and customer service processes.
- Companies wanting an integrated platform to unify customer data and interactions.
- Businesses seeking to deliver personalized, omnichannel customer experiences.
- Teams looking to leverage AI and automation to be more productive.
Key Features & Benefits
- Customer service software with features like a help desk, knowledge base, and customer portal to provide support across channels and improve customer satisfaction.
- Integrates natively with HubSpot's CRM and marketing automation software to unify data and give agents full context on customers.
- Proactive retention tools, such as customer health scores and product usage tracking, help identify opportunities to improve relationships.
- Scalable editions with premium features like advanced SLAs, playbooks, and workflows to manage high-volume support.
Pricing
HubSpot offers both free and paid tiers of its customer service software, Service Hub. There are three paid tiers:
- Starter: $9/month per seat
- Professional: $90/month per seat
- Enterprise: $150/month per seat
Pros
- Integration with other HubSpot products like Marketing Hub and Sales Hub
- Lots of features, even in the free tier, like ticketing, AI chatbot, and reporting
Cons
- The pricing tiers jump from $9/month to $90/month, which is a significant increase
- Limited information on what features are in each paid tier
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5. Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud is a customer service and support software that provides tools for case management, knowledge management, omnichannel routing, collaboration, automation, analytics, and AI to help businesses deliver personalized and efficient customer service.
Recommended for
Salesforce Service Cloud is for medium- and large-sized businesses across all industries with customer service teams that want to improve agent productivity, optimize support operations, and increase customer satisfaction.
Key Features & Benefits
- Automatically routes cases to agents based on skill and availability​.
- A centralized repository that allows agents and customers to access relevant articles​
- Provides a customizable workspace for agents to manage multiple cases efficiently​.
- Offers real-time, in-app video support and screen sharing for mobile users.
- Handles cases on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter​.
- An offline-first app for field workers to manage service appointments​.
- Empowers customers to book and manage their appointments through various channels​.
- AI-driven service tools that improve case resolutions with predictive analytics.
Pricing
- Service Cloud offers several pricing tiers with increasing features, from a basic Starter edition to a more advanced Unlimited edition
- Starter: $25 per user/month
- Pro: $100 per user/month
- Enterprise: $175 per user/month
- Unlimited: $350 per user/month
- Agentforce 1 Service: $500 per user/month
Pros
- Core features like case management and knowledge base in all tiersÂ
- Free trials available to test out the product
Cons
- Pricing is not straightforward - billed monthly or annually, depending on the tier
- Large price jump from Pro to Enterprise tiers‍
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6. Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a customer service software that provides helpdesk ticketing, knowledge base, chat, and collaboration tools to help companies deliver exceptional customer support.
Recommended for
- Small and medium-sized businesses that need affordable and easy-to-use customer support software.
- Support and customer service teams at companies that need to manage tickets, self-service, and agent collaboration.
- Businesses that want AI and automation to optimize their customer service operations.
Key Features & Benefits
- Converts requests from email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets.
- Automates ticket assignments, responses, and workflows to enhance productivity.
- Provides predictive support capabilities through Freddy AI to resolve queries faster.
- Allows customers to find solutions via a knowledge base, forums, and a community.
- Agents can collaborate and manage support tickets effectively through discussion threads and notes.
- An Interactive Voice Response system for efficient call routing.
- Provides real-time reporting and analytics on customer service performance.
Pricing
- Growth: €15/agent/month
- Pro: €49/agent/month
- Enterprise: €79/agent/month
Pros
- Free forever plan allows trying basic featuresÂ
- Reasonable pricing tiers for growing businesses
- No cancellation fees
Cons
- Unclear how many collaborators are supported on the Pro and Enterprise plans
- Complex pricing model for SMBs
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Improve Efficiency With Slack Integrations
Slack integrations for customer support can help your team work better. They put all customer chats in one place, making it easier to help quickly. Choose tools that fit your team's needs. Make sure everyone knows how to use them.Â
These tools save time, letting your team focus on important work. This can make customers happier and your team's job easier. Want to know how your organization can simplify ticketing and delight your customers? Get in touch to see ClearFeed in action today!
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