Web-based help desk designed for a great customer experience
4.96/5 (23 reviews)
19 people use thisStatistics are based on less than 50 users from the GetApp community.
See moreCreated for companies committed to providing a delightful customer experience, Help Scout is used by businesses of all sizes - freelancers, authors, nonprofits enterprises, e-commerce, and SaaS.
Help Scout is trusted by 5,000 customers in 70+ countries, including Basecamp, Buffer, GrubHub, AngelList and Timbuk2.
Read the full GetApp AnalysisGetApp’s ranking highlights the top 25 apps in different categories on GetApp. If an app is listed in more than one category, it has the potential to be ranked in each of these categories. The ranking is independent of any commercial campaign an app vendor has with GetApp. The ranking is based on 5 data points, each scored out of 20: reviews, integrations, mobile apps, media presence, and security.
Pricing model: Freemium, Subscription
Free Trial: Available (No Credit Card required)
From early to enterprise, we've got you covered. Plans range from Free to keep everyone on the same page, to Standard for automation features and reporting, to Plus for advanced reporting & features designed for large teams.
All Plans include 24x5 support, Unlimited volume & storage, iPhone app, 40+ third party integrations, and Annual payment earns you one month free!
Laurel Grey, Presenter at BRiN
We use Help Scout within our small team to manage ALL customer interactions. It's amazing, and we love the mobile app for ease of communication within the team. This way nothing falls through the cracks and customers get a fast response time.
Pros: - Super simple user interface - Built in canned responses make collaborating with the team really easy - Ability to add notes between team members - Merge feature between tickets to streamline operations
Cons: - Load time can be slow when forwarding in emails - No real-time notification when a new ticket comes in (you have to constantly refresh the page)
Rating breakdown
Value for money
Ease of use
Customer support
Time used
1-2 years
Matthew Sewell, Happiness Engineer at Flocknote
HelpScout has become an essential, can't-do-without part of my workday with how savvy and helpful it is in organizing contact with our customers and giving us a handy module for FAQs to boot.
Pros: - Keeping un-answered emails bolded even after you've read it once, - "Traffic Cop" for keeping egg off your face in case you send an email before reading a follow-up email from the customer - Intuitive inbox and Doc-editing interfaces - Ability to tag email addresses and assign conversations to a particular team member - "Show original" option to see the email in its original formatting, in case HelpScout's interface isn't able to accommodate - Quick customer service response times, to fix problems in a pinch - about 20 other things :-)
Cons: Pretty minor, really: - Sometimes the inbox counts don't always update automatically (between 30 seconds and a few mins, depending on the day) - I honestly can't think of any others (seriously, it's that good)
Rating breakdown
Value for money
Ease of use
Customer support
Time used
1-2 years
Nancy Sayo, Director of Customer Experience at BlueFrog
I have now integrated Help Scout in three companies. One of those, we decided to move to another platform to integrate with other features and boy did we regret it! I'm excited to be working with them again as they have always been amazing at customer service, prompt, helpful and friendly. I've even been part of beta service testing in the past, which was really great! I can't say enough about how easy it is it use and how beneficial it is to my customer service career!!! A gem I take with me everywhere.
Rating breakdown
Value for money
Ease of use
Customer support
Time used
1-2 years
Rob Claisse, Owner & CEO at Progression Sports
We were struggling to ensure all our customer support emails were replied to in a timely manner and often we were missing replies or getting confused when multiple employees needed to handle the support.
I tried a few different systems and they were either bolted on to Gmail, which got confusing or overly complicated for a small team. Finding Helpscout was a breath of fresh air. The web app was simple to setup and immediately it made sense with features that gave us the power to ensure we were giving our customers the best service possible.
Pros: * Simple to use with powerful features available if you need them * Great documentation so little or no training needed for new staff * Customer service from helpscout is brilliant with quick and helpful responses * Two favourite features - 1) the ease with which you can move assign conversations back and forward between staff members 2) Save replies - saves so much time!
Cons: * A mobile app or mobile optimised web app is really needed
Rating breakdown
Value for money
Ease of use
Customer support
Time used
1-2 years
Paul Yoder, Full Stack Web Developer and Founder of DonorElf
I'm a founder of a bootstrapped SaaS app, and only have 10 hours a week to work on it outside my full time job. That means I need a help desk product that gets out of my way and let's me quickly answer my users' questions and keeps track of what questions have been answered and what questions still need followed up on. I tried 4 or 5 different help desk products, and HelpScout was the simplest and its workflow made the most sense to me. I absolutely love how all the support tickets can be taken care of through email, and I don't have to login to the HelpScout app if I don't want to.
I've been using HelpScout for over a year now, and recommend it to anyone looking for a simple help desk product.
Ayca Miller, Account Manager at CAKE (getCAKE.com)
Help Scout has changed the way we handle Support request in an extremely positive way. I know that our emails to our clients are in good hands when going through Help Scout, and it's great that I can keep track of whether or not a client has read our responses and their reports and insight help us analyze what we do well, and what we can do better.
There has been only one instance I can recall where Help Scout ran into a glitch, and they were immediately responsive and helpful with the situation. They were proactive in that they emailed their clients and informed us of not only what had happened, but of what to expect!
Help Scout also writes extremely helpful blogs for any Client Service related business! I've learned a lot, and will continue to read these as their published. The subject line, "Monkey See, Monkey Do", is because it's clear that Help Scout follows their own advice when it comes to servicing clients and keeping them happy!
Jordan Smith, Customer Happiness Engineer at Simply Charlotte Mason
I am utterly enthused by HelpScout! It is fast, elegant, and even sometimes fun to use. Almost everything I need to serve my company's customers is included right there in the app. Plus it has a nice API that our webmaster has used to give me information from our online store about past customer orders.
Pros: - Easy interface that allows me to quickly move through my open tickets. - Quick assignment to other workers. - Beautiful saved reply search feature makes it simple to answer frequently asked questions.
Cons: The only real problem I've had is that the attachment system gets stuck whenever I try to upload by dragging files into the window. Otherwise, HelpScout is brilliant.
Sarah Kirscht, Senior Account Manager Operations bei white label eCommerce GmbH
Before we started using Help Scout almost 2 years ago we didn't have any numbers to track and analyze our support. Right now we can't image living without the reports and insights we get every single day. It helped us being so much better at helping our customers and realizing where we need to improve our app.
Oh - and their blog is pretty cool, too :)
Andre Tanguy
The more we use HelpScout, the more we love it (and so do our customers!!) Thanks for a truly awesome piece of software that really is making a HUGE difference to our business.
Yoshi
We are loving Help Scout—our work flow has gone from broken to functional in the space of a day. It’s great :)
Help Scout is an invisible, email-based help desk for companies who value their customers. A great customer experience thrives on effortless communication, and Help Scout facilitates this by focusing on creating conversations. One key feature of Help Scout is that from a customer standpoint, communication is personal. From the support side, you can manage multiple inboxes and brands, track and organize your customer’s conversations, add notes, collaborate with team members, and a lot more.
Help Scout’s features are deliberately designed to support the front line, helping your customer service team to provide excellent support. Some of these features are integrated knowledge base, real-time reports, workflows that filter emails and automate actions, saved replies, and collision detection.
Help Scout is a web-based help desk with an intuitive interface that keeps all of your support requests in one place. With a robust API, real-time reporting, an integrated knowledge base, and features that enhance team collaboration, the end result is tailored to focus on what matters: your customers.
This design feature represents Help Scout’s core value: It’s about conversations, not ticket numbers. Customers don’t feel like they’re just a number or waiting in a long line. Instead of a corporate template, Help Scout’s email response layout is designed to be personal.
Help Scout offers Docs, a knowledge base that you can install in just a few clicks. Everyone on your support team can easily create step-by-step articles and tutorials to help customers 24/7 and keep support requests to a minimum.
Creating articles in Docs is simple. You can create them from scratch, or upload existing HTML, Markdown or text files. Links, images, videos, and file attachments are all supported. With a simple style guide, content can be formatted in many ways from top to bottom. Once installed, you can also upload your company’s logo and instantly get a website that looks good on any device.
Help Scout is equipped with real-time reporting, helping managers understand what’s happening on the support front, no matter the time of day. Viewed within the dashboard, Help Scout reports are categorized into four categories: Conversations, Productivity, Team, and Happiness.
Conversation metrics show the busiest time of day, conversations answered, number of customers, and more. Productivity focuses on the help desk’s efficiency metrics, such as time spent answering conversations, first response time, and resolution times. Team/User reports allow high-level insights into the metrics of each team member, such as the number of customers helped and the handle time. Happiness scores are derived from customer feedback to gauge the overall customer experience. Help Scout’s report filters (tag, folder, or conversation type) helps focus your reports on the data that you’re interested in.
Help Scout’s workflows function like Gmail filters or other email client rules. Workflows can both be manual or automatic. Automatic workflows are IF/THEN statements, where actions take place automatically when conditions are met, i.e., if a conversation has “billing” in the subject line, then it’ll be assigned to the appropriate person. The user can apply manual workflows at any time to a single conversation, or in bulk. Manual workflows require user action.
The “auto-reply” is a mailbox-specific feature that sends when new messages are generated, i.e., “Hey, we got your message and we’ll be in touch soon!” Everyone on the team can use Saved Replies (often called “canned responses”) to quickly answer common questions.
Whenever you work on a conversation in Help Scout, you see visual indicators that tell you if a colleague is working on the same task and what actions they’re currently performing, e.g., viewing or replying — a feature referred to as the Traffic Cop, which prevents duplicate replies from being sent. If someone has replied ahead of you, Traffic Cop allows you to review the updates and then gives you the option to send your pending reply as is, edit it, or discard it altogether.
Each message flagged by Traffic Cop is flagged in a Needs Attention folder located on the sidebar. Once the threads are addressed, the folder automatically disappears. Traffic Cop is on by default but, although not recommended, can be disabled upon request.
Help Scout integrates with over 40 third-party applications that include AgileCRM, Capsule and Highrise for CRM, HipChat, Slack and Talkdesk for communication, Constant Contact, Infusionsoft and MailChimp for marketing, BigCommerce, Freshbooks and Magento for ecommerce and invoicing, and FullStory, KISSmetrics and Segment.io for analytics.
Help Scout has one price with no surprises – $15 per user per month. They also offer a free plan that includes a maximum of three users and one mailbox. There are no email storage or processing limits on either plan.
Docs is offered at a flat rate, $25 per month, and not tied to any user accounts . Customer support is readily available for all customers, and there aren't any customization fees.
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