I get my work done in less time and it's totally more proactive than the previous tool we used!
Read the full reviewOverall great. Would recommend to others.
Read the full reviewGetApp’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.
Starting from: $8.00/month
Pricing model: 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!
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.
I get my work done in less time and it's totally more proactive than the previous tool we used!
Pros
Besides the fact I can assign emails to my teammates or other inboxes of other departments - the tagging and automated triggers make my life so much easier!
Cons
I think this is kind of irrelevant, but the fact I can't change the font and the color of the text is sometimes a problem.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Overall great. Would recommend to others.
Pros
Great reporting options Easy to use Awesome customer support team Great search options Easy to set up
Cons
Their help docs are often outdated. Also some of the features that stated were included ended up having a extra monthly charge.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Pros
Very easy to use, has unlimited users, simple, has mobile apps, and everyone's signature can be uniform.
Cons
No app integrations, barely any help center, don't like the way the contact form looks, no phone or live chat support.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
Help Scout is easy to use, has some great metrics, makes organization a breeze, and allows companies to standardize email responses. But in all honesty, my favorite thing about Help Scout is the weekly newsletter they send out via email. It may be more or less often than weekly, I'm not entirely sure; however, I just love it! I almost always read the entire thing. It focuses on one topic, it's always helpful, and it's often strangely timely so far as what's going on in my professional and/or personal life. I've found it really useful. Indeed, two Christmases ago, my list included multiple items I learned about one of Help Scout's newsletters!
Pros
The email newsletter.
Cons
How sometimes emails end up being responded to by multiple agents because they aren't automatically closed out.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Recommendations to others considering Help Scout
None I can think of at this time.
Been using Help Scout for years. The main reason I went with them over others was the still small business feel you can give your customers even with dozens of employees being involved in customer interaction. The tickets are silent to the customer, unlike many other products which a customer is nothing more than a ticket.
Pros
- Easy interface - Lower learning curve - Continually improving - Good customer support - All cloud based
Cons
- Per-user costs can add up
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Recommendations to others considering Help Scout
I recommend you try it, it's a great product.
We've used Help Scout for several years. It's been a great product, really served us well. One of their best features is actually their marketing and weekly (twice a week now?) blog posts on Support, Marketing, and other related fields.
Pros
Super easy UI. I don't have to train newbies on using Help Scout for more than 10-15 minutes. It's that simple to use. VERY customer focused. It's not about a bunch of bells and whistles that are flashy fish hooks only intended to get bought by fishermen but not actually catch fish. Their product signs for the customer and the Support rep in it 8+ hours a day.
Cons
The lack of integrations. They just rolled out with a Salesforce integration, but lack integrations in other areas. Also, they're primarily focused on email so tracking chats and calls aren't that helpful...you would need to drop that data into Redshift, Gooddata, Domo, etc. to get much functionality in it. So unless you do that, you're stuck compiling a bunch in Google Sheets. Caveat: if all you do is email and maybe chat, then this product is everything you need and more.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Recommendations to others considering Help Scout
Definitely. Review Zendesk and a couple other offerings, but Help Scout is fantastic for small and medium teams. Where Zendesk shines with their management level controls and granular options, they fail in the actual UI and "using it every day" area. Help Scout is the inverse.
We've been using Help Scout for ticket management for about three years. Prior to Help Scout we had used several others, most notably Zendesk. We found that Help Scout was the easiest for our team to use, while still providing a good set of features for customization. The support team at Help Scout has been fantastic as well; they've been very receptive to feature suggestions, quick to resolve what few issues we've encountered, and every contact with them has been a great experience. That last part is important; I personally deal with the support teams of a dozen or so vendors on a regular basis and sometimes the lack of attention to detail and reading comprehension in level 1 support is astounding. Very refreshing!
Our work became much more efficient ever since we started using Help Scout for our customer support. I love their ticketing system and the ability to assign tickets to different employees and write internal notes. I also love their saved replies feature that could include variables such as the name of the customer.
They make it simple to set up to run a small support team. Creating docs are as easy as creating a blog post too. Having one inbox for all the team to attend to is also helping us, and for sure others who are using this. And of course, the saved replies save us a lot of time. Move over Zendesk, I now love Help Scout!
Pros
It works much more like an inbox. Logical ticketing system. Set up one inbox that could be managed by multiple people (Even their FREE plan has this!)
Rating breakdown
Time used: Less than 6 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Having tried or reviewed every customer support solution we could find, we have found Help Scout to be the best solution because of it being as simple to use as regular email, yet powerful enough to handle all of our company's communication. Help Scout is the key tool we use in our web development and hosting business, handling all of our client communication and allowing us to easily discuss requests internally, pass around messages, and provide quicker response times to our clients while making our lives easier. Additionally, the customer support Help Scout provides is the best we've ever seen. They are super friendly, very quick to respond, and understand requests the first time. They are the model for customer support, and they even blog regularly about how to provide great customer support with very useful tips.
Created 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 Analysis
