Help Scout Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

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.

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.

No Ticket Numbers

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.

Integrated Knowledge Base

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.

Real-Time Reporting

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.

Workflows, Auto-Reply, and Saved Replies

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.

Collision Detection (aka Traffic Cop)

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] (http://www.getapp.com/capsule-crm-application) and [Highrise] (http://www.getapp.com/highrise-crm-application) for CRM, [HipChat] (http://www.getapp.com/hipchat-application), [Slack] (http://www.getapp.com/slack-application) and Talkdesk for communication, [Constant Contact] (http://www.getapp.com/email-marketing-from-constant-contact-application), [Infusionsoft] (http://www.getapp.com/infusionsoft-crm-tool-for-small-businesses-application) and [MailChimp] (http://www.getapp.com/mailchimp-application) for marketing, [BigCommerce] (http://www.getapp.com/bigcommerce-application), [Freshbooks] (http://www.getapp.com/freshbooks-application) and [Magento] (http://www.getapp.com/magento-application-1) for ecommerce and invoicing, and FullStory, [KISSmetrics] (http://www.getapp.com/kissmetrics-application) 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.

• Help desk solution where conversations with customers look like normal email threads
• No more clunky ticketing portal and multiple logins for customers to get the support and information they need
• Easy to set up and implement, no complex macros and training manual required
• Clutter-free interface to keep users focused on delivering great service, as opposed to intricate software navigation
• Straightforward pricing plan at a monthly $15 per user