What is Office Elves?

Office Elves is an all-in-one front-office tool: a workshop of helpers that handle customer support tickets, an LLM-powered chat agent, a CRM, a sales pipeline and marketing in one place, with an embeddable chat widget per workspace. It is a friendly, affordable alternative to Salesforce for small businesses.

Is Office Elves a Salesforce alternative?

Yes. Office Elves is a simpler, more affordable alternative to Salesforce and similar CRMs, built for small businesses that want support, CRM, sales and marketing in one easy place rather than a complex enterprise suite.

For teams of one to ten

AI customer support software for small teams

Office Elves puts an AI support agent on your website with one line of script. It answers from your own knowledge base, hands off to a human when it should, and files everything as tidy tickets with SLA timers, so a team of one can support customers like a team of ten.

Why small teams need AI support most

Enterprise support teams use AI to shave costs. Small teams need it for something more basic: coverage. When the whole company is two or three people, nobody is answering chat at 11pm, on Sunday, or during the school run. Those are real customers with real questions, and most of those questions ("where is my order", "what is your returns policy", "do you ship to Ireland") have answers that are already written down somewhere.

That is exactly the job the Office Elves agent does. You give it your FAQs, policies and product notes; it answers visitors in seconds, around the clock, in your voice; and it fetches a human for the minority of conversations that genuinely need one. You stop being the bottleneck without pretending a robot can do the whole job.

Grounded answers, not improvisation

The agent is built on Anthropic's Claude, and it is deliberately constrained. It answers from the knowledge base you write inside Office Elves, not from the open internet, so it will not invent a refund policy you do not have. You configure each agent's persona, greeting and tone (warm, professional or playful), and you can run multiple agents on the Growth plan and above. When a question falls outside its knowledge, or a customer asks for a person, it escalates rather than guessing.

What happens after the chat

An answer in the widget is only half of support. The rest is what Office Elves does with the conversation:

Escalations land in a shared inbox. Conversations flagged as needing a human appear for your team, who reply in the same thread the customer already has open.
Tickets with real SLA timers. Requests become tickets with status, priority and assignee. First-response deadlines are set automatically by priority: 30 minutes for urgent, 2 hours for high, 8 hours for normal, 24 hours for low.
Automations do the triage. Keyword rules can set priority, add tags or assign a teammate the moment a ticket is created, and canned responses (macros) speed up the human replies.
Every conversation updates the CRM. Visitors become contacts with history, tags, custom fields and attachments, shared with the sales pipeline and email campaigns in the same workspace.
Reports show what the AI is actually doing. Tickets record whether they were AI-handled, so you can see the share of work the agent resolves on its own, and export the numbers to CSV.

What it costs

AI is not an add-on here; it is the product. Every plan includes the chat agent and a monthly pool of AI replies: Starter (£19 per month) includes 500 replies and 2 seats, Growth (£49) includes 3,000 replies, 6 seats, the sales pipeline and campaigns, Scale (£149) includes 15,000 replies, 25 seats and API access, and Enterprise (£799) includes 100,000 replies and unlimited seats. You can start free without a card, and the full plan details are on the pricing section.

What this is not

Honesty matters more than a keyword ranking, so: Office Elves does not do phone support, it does not have an app marketplace, and its AI will not handle conversations you have not given it knowledge for (by design). If you need omnichannel telephony or hundreds of integrations, a large help desk suite is the better fit; we compare ourselves honestly on our Zendesk alternative page. What Office Elves is: the fastest way for a small team to get trustworthy AI support, tickets and a CRM working together, today, for less than the price of a round of coffees.

Give your customers a night shift

Start free, paste one script tag, teach the agent your FAQs, and let it take the first reply while you sleep.

Start free, no card See pricing

Frequently asked questions

What AI does Office Elves use for customer support?

The chat agent is built on Anthropic's Claude. It answers using only the knowledge base you provide (your FAQs, policies and product docs), with a persona, greeting and tone you configure per agent. It does not invent policies: when a question falls outside what you have taught it, or the customer asks for a person, it hands the conversation to a human.

How much does AI customer support cost with Office Elves?

AI replies are included in every plan rather than sold as an add-on: Starter is £19 per month with 500 AI replies and 2 seats, Growth is £49 with 3,000 replies and 6 seats, Scale is £149 with 15,000 replies and 25 seats, and Enterprise is £799 with 100,000 replies. By comparison, dedicated AI support add-ons from the big help desks are often priced per agent per month on top of an existing per-agent subscription.

Will the AI answer questions incorrectly?

Any AI can be wrong, so Office Elves is designed to limit the blast radius: the agent answers from your own knowledge base rather than the open internet, you control its instructions and tone, and it escalates to a human when it is unsure. Conversations it handles are visible in your inbox afterwards, and tickets record whether they were AI-handled, so you can audit what it said and tighten the knowledge base where needed.

How long does setup take?

Genuinely an afternoon for most small businesses. You sign up free, paste one script tag on your website to enable the chat widget, write or paste your FAQs into the knowledge base, and set the agent's greeting and tone. There is no code beyond the single script tag and no consultant required.

What happens when the AI cannot help a customer?

The conversation is flagged as needing a human and appears in your shared inbox, where your team replies in the same thread. It can also become a ticket with a priority and an automatic first-response SLA timer (30 minutes for urgent through to 24 hours for low priority), so escalated conversations do not get lost.

Is Office Elves only a support tool?

No. The same workspace includes a contacts CRM with custom fields, a drag-and-drop sales pipeline, email campaigns with tag-based segments, and reports with CSV export. Support, sales and marketing share one customer record, which is the point: for a small team the whole front office lives in one product with one bill.