Best 5 AI customer service automation software for online printing and photo businesses (2025)

Running a business in the online printing, photo, and customisation industries comes with its fair share of challenges. Whether it's handling high volumes of customer inquiries, managing complex customisation requests, or staying on top of seasonal spikes – your support agents have enough on their plate. It can be especially tough to keep up while still delivering fast, accurate, and personalised support.

That’s where AI customer service automation software comes in. It can help you improve agent efficiency, reduce response times, and provide consistent support across all channels  – all without adding to your workload.

In this article, we’ll review the top 5 AI customer service automation solutions for the online printing, photo and customisation industries and evaluate their pros and cons. Here’s our list:

• Engaige
• Zowie
• DigitalGenius
• Zendesk AI Agents (formerly Ultimate AI)
• eDesk

Top 5 AI customer service automation solutions for online printing, photo and customisation businesses

We’ve rounded up the top 5 tools that can help your customer service team handle high volumes of complex queries, improve response times, and actually increase customer satisfaction. To compile this list, we considered key factors like ease of integration, automation capabilities, and how well each platform supports complex customer inquiries in the online printing, photo, and customisation industries.

And, just so you know, Engaige is our #1 pick – but keep reading to see why!

1. Engaige

Let’s kick off this list with Engaige – yes, that’s us 😉 Engaige is an AI customer service automation platform designed to improve support operations by automating repetitive tasks and providing human-like interactions.

With over 20 years of experience in customer service, our team has developed a solution that integrates seamlessly with existing systems, offering 24/7 availability across multiple channels, including email, chat, and social media. This ensures that your customers receive timely and consistent support – no matter when or how they reach out. 

Engaige has already helped leading organisations like Mixam to automate 50% of chats and partnered with HelloPrint to save head count costs by 72%. Automating recurring support tasks allows your human agents to focus on more complex and customisation-specific inquiries, thereby improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.

And the best part is, you don’t have to set it up alone. Our team of experts provides all the support you need to implement, deploy, and improve your AI agents over time.

Highlights:

• Easily integrates with your existing customer service tech stack
• Offers natural, conversational responses
• Allows you to provide 24/7 multichannel support
• Automates up to 80% of inquiries
• Offers full visibility into the AI’s decision-making process
• Includes expert guidance to ensure successful deployment and adoption

2. Zowie

Zowie is an AI-powered customer service automation platform designed to improve customer interactions across various channels.

For a global business in the online printing, photo, and customisation industry, Zowie could help manage complex customer inquiries by providing consistent, on-brand responses and integrating well with existing customer service platforms.

Pros:

• Provides omnichannel customer support
• Multilingual communication capabilities

Cons:

• Limited industry-specific customisation
• Integration with specialized tools is unclear
• Not able to handle complex queries at scale
• Steep learning curve for human agents

3. DigitalGenius

DigitalGenius is a code-free customer experience platform for e-commerce and retail powered by artificial intelligence. It combines conversational, visual, and generative AI to comprehend customer inquiries, integrate deeply for issue resolution, and personalise interactions with empathy.

Pros:

• Specialises in the e-commerce industry
• Advanced AI capabilities

Cons:

• Standardised for typical e-commerce businesses
• Steep learning curve for to use the software
• Outdated analytics interface
• Not the best fit to handle a high volume of complex queries

4. Zendesk AI Agents (formerly Ultimate AI)

Zendesk's AI Agents are AI-powered bots designed to automate over 80% of customer interactions across various channels. They provide instant, personalised support, aiming to enhance customer satisfaction while reducing operational costs.

However, Zendesk doesn’t provide implementation support leaving you to properly train and set up your AI agents on your own. This can quickly become a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.

Pros:

• Easy to set up
• Ability to deliver personalised support

Cons:

• Limited ability to automate complex queries
• Limited implementation support
• One of the pricier options on the market
• Requires an understanding of conditional logic to effectively create and manage chatbots

5. eDesk

eDesk is an AI-driven customer support platform tailored for e-commerce businesses, offering features like AI-driven summaries, sentiment analysis, and automated responses to improve support efficiency.

Unfortunately, the platform has some drawbacks such as occasional inaccuracies in ticket management, a subpar search feature, and a steep learning curve, which can impact overall usability and efficiency.

Pros:

• Sentiment analysis helps human agents tailor responses based on customer mood
• Reduce response time with AI response summaries

Cons:

• Steep learning curve when starting to use the software
• Ineffective search functionality which makes it difficult to find the correct tickets
• Some users report significant software glitches and bugs
• Complicated pricing structure

How to use AI customer service automation software to solve challenges in the online printing, photo and customisation industries

Leading companies like HelloPrint and Mixam are already using AI customer service automation software to improve agent efficiency, provide quality customer service, and enable their teams to handle higher volumes of inquiries.

With automation taking care of repetitive tasks and providing support across multiple channels, human agents can focus on more complex and personalised customer needs.

Here are 6 ways online printing, photo and customisation businesses can start using AI customer service software:

Handle a high volume of queries

Customer service teams in the online printing, photo and customisation industries typically have to handle a large number of queries around-the-clock. Often, these are repetitive requests for things like order statuses, delivery times or file requirements. And when you factor in seasonality, the number of customer queries can quickly rack up.

With AI customer service automation software, customer service teams can significantly increase their capacity and work more efficiently by automating responses to common queries. This type of software can support your team by:

• Instantly resolving repetitive questions so your human agents can focus on more complex tasks
• Automatically tagging tickets and escalating urgent or high-value queries to agents
• Handling queries outside of business hours to reduce the backlog for agents when they return

See how Mixam automated 50% of its support chats while maintaining the quality of its customer service.

Reduce response times with 24/7 customer service

In fast-paced industries like online printing, photo and customisation customers expect speed. If they have to wait for a response, they may grow frustrated, abandon their cart, and take their business elsewhere.But customer service teams are easily stretched beyond their capacity in these businesses. Agents are dealing with high volumes of inquiries, highly complex requests for custom products, and often last-minute changes to orders.AI customer service automation software helps human agents reduce response time by:

• Automatically answering common questions
• Allowing you to provide 24/7 support with an AI agent
• Suggesting responses or actions so your human agents are more responsive

Automate support on any channel

One of the golden rules of providing quality customer service is to meet your customers where they are. This means your customer service team needs to be everywhere at once: chat, email, WhatApp, social media… And that’s not easy to achieve:

• Volume: More channels means more queries, adding to the workload of already strained customer service teams.
• Context: If a customer starts a conversation on chat and then continues via email, agents will need more time to find the full context of the conversation. This leads to slower response times.
• Training: Writing a concise chat response to a technical question is different from drafting a detailed email about a more complex issue. This requires additional training.
• Time pressure: Some channels, such as live chat and social media, demand almost instantaneous responses which can be stressful for human agents who are already managing multiple tasks.

With AI, providing omnichannel support is a much faster and hassle-free process. Simply set up the business logic for your AI Agent one time and configure which channels you want to apply this to. Then, for each channel, develop the workflows you want to maintain complete control over which queries are handled by AI and how.

(And yes, you can even automate a channel like email with a software solution like Engaige.)

Help human agents respond to complex queries

Whether it’s a bride needing wedding photo prints or a company preparing custom merchandise for an event, customer service agents in the online printing, photo and customisation industries deal with high-pressure scenarios. That’s where a little help from an AI agent can come in handy.AI customer service automation software can often act like a smart assistant that helps human agents tackle complex customer queries more efficiently and successfully.

Here are a few ways AI agents, like Engaige, can help your human customer service representatives:

• Automatically tagging tickets: AI can analyse the content of each inquiry that comes in and instantly tag it based on key details to help your agents quickly identify issues and prioritise them.
• Reduce repetitive questions getting to your human team: By analysing ticket content, history and urgency, AI agents decide whether they can solve the inquiry autonomously or if it needs human attention.
• Recommend responses and actions for human agents: Complex customisation requests require agents to provide detailed and accurate responses quickly. AI can suggest pre-written, context-specific replies or propose next action steps to speed up response times.

Offer multilingual support

The great thing about running an online printing or photo business is that your customer base can truly be global. But that’s not just a matter of putting your business on the internet – you need to be able to actually speak with your customers to provide them with the support they need. However, hiring multilingual customer service agents can quickly become an expensive and time-consuming process.With AI customer service automation software, you don’t need to worry about that. Providing multilingual support is significantly easier and simpler.

Engaige’s AI agents, for example, work across multiple languages. This means you can define your business logic in one language and then scale it to all languages without needing to manually translate every piece of information. Plus, you can slightly tweak the business logic per country or region to create a tailored and localised experience for your customers.

Scale support while keeping costs low

Scaling customer support in industries highly impacted by seasonality can be a tricky process to navigate. Businesses that operate in the online printing, photo and customisation industries face significant spikes in demand (and therefore customer queries) during holidays and event seasons. And if your team isn’t ready to handle the influx, customers can face delays, frustration, and potentially cancel their orders.

But responding to more tickets doesn’t have to mean hiring more agents. With AI customer service automation software, you can actually keep your costs low while still:

• Providing 24/7 support
• Offering customer support in multiple languages
• Handling high volumes of complex customer queries

See how HelloPrint improved the quality of their customer service while streamlining their team from 100 to 28 agents.

Why Engaige is the best solution for online printing, photo and customisation businesses

Engaige is built to tackle the unique challenges of online printing, photo, and customisation businesses by automating repetitive tasks and providing personalised, human-like support 24/7 across all channels. With features like AI-driven ticket routing and response suggestions, your team can resolve complex customer inquiries faster and with greater accuracy.

‍Book a demo today to discover how Engaige can improve your customer service and streamline your operations.