This category covers the tools that sit between marketing and the customer: live chat on the site, shared inboxes, ticketing, and outbound prospecting. Small businesses usually buy here because response times have slipped and messages are falling between people. The mistake is buying a channel you cannot staff. A chat widget nobody answers within a minute damages trust more than having no widget at all, and a ticket queue with no owner is just a slower inbox.
How to choose
Decide whether you need conversations or tickets
A shared inbox keeps support feeling like email: threads, replies, an assignee. A help desk turns everything into a ticket with a status, an SLA and routing rules. Ticketing pays off once volume is high enough that you need to prove what was answered and when, or once more than a handful of agents are working the same queue. Below that it adds ceremony your customers can feel.
Count the channels you will actually run
Email, chat, phone, social and messaging apps each need coverage during your working hours. Buy for the channels you will staff this quarter, not the omnichannel diagram. It is far easier to add a channel later than to quietly abandon one that customers have already started using.
Separate outbound tools from support tools
Prospecting software and support software look adjacent but carry different risks. Support tools risk cost and complexity. Outbound automation risks your accounts and your reputation, because many platforms prohibit the automation these tools perform. Treat the two as separate decisions with separate approvals.
Check the vendor’s direction
This is a consolidating market. Before committing, check that the product is being invested in rather than wound down, and confirm you can export your conversation history if you leave.
The tools in this category
- Help Scout — best at keeping support feeling like ordinary email rather than ticketing; suits small teams outgrowing a shared Gmail account.
- Freshdesk — best at turning email, chat, phone and social into trackable tickets with SLAs and routing; suits teams that need reporting on response times.
- Zendesk — best at running many channels through one queue at scale, with deep configuration; suits support teams of roughly five agents upward.
- LiveChat — best at real-time conversations with website visitors and the agent workspace around them; suits small sales or support teams that can genuinely staff chat during work hours.
- Drift — best at conversational marketing, turning site visitors into sales chats and booked meetings; suits nobody starting fresh today, as Salesloft is winding it down, so existing users should plan an exit.
- Quicklead — best at running multi-step LinkedIn outreach campaigns automatically; suits teams willing to accept that LinkedIn does not permit automation and accounts carry a real risk of restriction.
What to watch out for
- Per-agent pricing plus per-channel add-ons. The advertised seat cost often excludes phone, messaging or advanced routing; price the configuration you will actually run.
- Opening a channel you cannot cover. Chat and social create an expectation of minutes, not days, and unanswered widgets are worse than absent ones.
- Automation that risks the account. Outbound tools acting on a platform against its terms put the underlying profile at stake, not just the subscription.
- Data you cannot take with you. Conversation history is your record of what was promised — confirm the export format before you migrate in.
Questions people ask
When should we move off a shared mailbox?
When you cannot tell who is replying to what, or when you need to answer questions about volume and response time. Collision and reporting are the two things a plain mailbox cannot do.
Is live chat worth it for a small team?
Only with defined hours and someone assigned. Set clear availability and use a form outside those hours rather than leaving the widget unattended.
Should sales and support share one tool?
Sharing a customer record helps; sharing a queue usually does not. The two have different urgency and different definitions of done.
See the full, always-current list on the sales and support tools category page.