Help Scout Reviews

Pros

- extremely simple to use and understand as a user
- treats communications like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers)
- fantastic support team that's very responsive and solution focused
- solid API that allows you to bring in data from other apps so that you have a consolidated view of a client, beyond just their email history

Cons

- wish that the interface could be a little more customized for our specific needs
- really don't have any downsides to it - it's a great product

Pros

Help Scout is great for our 4-person Customer Success Team. We have been using it for over a year and it helps us provide high-quality customer support. It is easy to use, our customers like it because our emails look just like normal emails. Their support team is great, we always get quick and relevant answers.

Cons

I think the reporting feature could really be improved, and we would appreciate a few more features to improve the daily management of support tickets.

Alternatives Considered

Intercom and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Help Scout

Gmail doesn't work well as a shared inbox.

Switched From

Gmail

Reasons for Switching to Help Scout

Help Scout looks more like a regular inbox and not an overly automated ticketing system. It is very easy to setup and use. It is also cheaper.

Pros

It's reliable, and has most of the functions we need.

Cons

It feels like the ticketing system has now been abandoned as far as new development is concerned. There have been some minor improvements listed for their beacon /messaging widget but little of consequence. As far as I can only the email address passed to their widget is hashed, custom variables are not so bad actors can pass fake or malicious data to support agents. No UK or EU servers.

Pros

A robust feature set provided by Help Scout is revolutionizing customer support administration. Its user-friendly interface enables seamless ticket administration, providing effective and well-organized customer contact. Teams can work together on client queries using the software's collaborative inbox, which leads to quicker responses and more customer satisfaction. Help Scout's automation features automate monotonous operations to give support workers more time. Additionally, it offers meaningful insights into customer service effectiveness through its extensive reporting and analytics. Businesses may quickly link their preferred products to Help Scout's vast integration possibilities and design a unique support environment. Overall, Help Scout improves efficiency, streamlines customer support processes, and improves the client experience.

Cons

There are some restrictions to take into account, despite the fact that Help Scout has several advantages. The absence of native phone and chat support tools, which may be essential for enterprises needing real-time client communication, is one downside. Furthermore, learning the sophisticated functions of Help Scout might have a steep learning curve for new users, demanding rigorous onboarding and training. Periodic bugs and poor system performance have been reported by certain users, which can reduce productivity. Last but not least, the pricing structure can be a problem for startups or small firms with tight funds. Help Scout is a top option for customer support management in spite of these shortcomings thanks to its total value and robust feature set.

Pros

It was easy to get going and was the first app we used for customer service. It had integration with multiple other apps such as Mailchimp. Supports multiple users.

Cons

It was ticket-oriented, got us into working more with tickets than customers pretty quickly, not because HelpScout but because using tickets and emails for support.

There was no integration with our website, so this was a bummer.

Pros

Super easy to pick up and use and their support was great. They always responded promptly and did their best.

Cons

Compared to other products, it lacks a lot of features and some of what it does have is too simplified.

Pros

HelpScout is really simple to use & has a really clean interface and their customer service is A+++. I am someone who will stay with the company even if they don't have all the bells and whistles if they have excellent customer service, especially something like an email provider because it's hard to find really great customer service in email. I have been using it for over 10 years, & it also is like a database of all of my customer interactions. So I can type in the customers name at the top of the screen and it will pull up every email that they've ever sent in and every email that we've ever sent to them so it becomes this really powerful documentation tool.

Cons

It doesn't have a ticketing system. So it's not so it sometimes it can be easy to miss emails or to have customer service emails go unanswered if a lot of emails come in at once. And a ticketing system and a lot of other email platforms it will bump it up to the top for you if you haven't answered it in a set amount of days but help scout doesn't have a easy way to do that. Even though it does have a knowledge base it's just not as strong in terms of customer service portal as some of the other tools I've explored like fresh desk.

Pros

The most important feature about helpscout is the tags feature which allow you track tickets better. As well as saved replies and the super friendly user interface

Cons

Helpscout does know allow to add multiple email signatures within the same user and it forces the addition of multiple users.

Pros

It has beautiful and easy-to-use UI and UX. It has been made by amazing professionals already in the customer care space. Help Scout can be brought on to any company scale and proves itself with metric improvements rapidly.

Cons

Help Scout's pricing plans are a little expensive, especially for small businesses or startups.

Pros

I liked how simple it was to use Help Scout. It had a simple, clean design that was easy to navigate, and the customer service representatives were extremely helpful and knowledgeable. It was also convenient that the help desk was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so I could get assistance whenever I needed it.

Cons

The lack of customization options was the least appealing aspect of Help Scout to me. The platform is quite limited in terms of customizing the look and feel of the customer service experience. Furthermore, the customer service representatives appeared to be unfamiliar with product and its features.

Pros

They refer to support tickets as conversations, which might not seem like much at first but if you really think about how much you value your customers you will appreciate this verbiage.

They have offline/live chat support pop ups that they call "beacons" and you can have different ones depending on where a customer is at on the page. This was extremely helpful for me as I am selling software so having a beacon on the general website for pre-sales was a must but I also wanted a secondary beacon behind a paywall for premium support and their platform allows for this type of setup.

Lastly, most live chat companies only cater towards just that --- live chat. However, I wanted an all in one solution of live chat + a knowledge base. Help Scout has both available within their platform and it's super simple to setup.

Cons

The only thing I feel they could improve on is more features as far as layout and styling for the knowledge base. It was lacking in that sense but other than that I didn't see anything that I personally needed to be different.

Alternatives Considered

Freshdesk, Crisp, Intercom and Zendesk Suite

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.

Pros

They are super responsive. They are pretty rad and transparent: if something goes wrong on their end they are not afraid of admitting fault. Which leads me to trusting them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little of the product, but as leadership that's something that I really need. Other environments—blameshifting—I cannot stand and can't trust, believe, or hope that they'll hold true to their promise. We're leaving another vendor for that reason.

Their system is very responsive, quick, simple, and easy to learn. There aren't too many bells and whistles which simplifies my life when onboarding new teammates. Their docs are well written and engaging.

Cons

The vendor is great!

I'd say a better or more thorough live chat & phone integration would be great. We communicate with customers via email, phone, live chat, and Twitter. It's hard when all these are fairly decentralized. Help Scout *does* have a live chat integration (which we use) and we can forward VMs to Help Scout (which is great). But if you're looking for tracking call length, live chat length, or some of the other nifty metrics in one central place, you'll need to use Excel or a Google Sheet. Or use everyone's API to feed into your own system.

Pros

Initial setup is straightforward. We currently only use the ticketing/email feature in HelpScout, so setup and email configuration were complete in less than 10 minutes.

The interface is clean, direct, and getting used to the layout is quick.

We have synced our main Mailbox queue to a private channel in Slack, so each time there's a new ticket is sent there, which is beneficial to keep track of incoming tickets.

Working with HelpScout is simple and straightforward. Currently, we only use the ticketing feature, and it's been a gratifying experience. All the essentials like adding internal notes, tags, tagging other agents, and replying to customers are there.

My favourite feature is the search function, which helps you find that four-week-old ticket you closed a while ago easily just by searching a few keywords that were included in it.

Cons

So far, the only complaint we had was the "next" feature, once you reply to a ticket, the next open ticket assigned to you would pop up immediately, and if you're not careful, you might respond the wrong thing to the customer!

Pros

It has user friendly interface, multi-channel support and can integrate with other tools like slack .

Cons

It has very limited features.pricing is a bit Higher and has limited language support.

Pros

Having used Zendesk for years, I was looking for a alternative option without breaking the bank. Help Scout has all the features i needed for my team, and more.

Help Scout looks/feels great. Everything is right where it needs to be. I can quickly show a new employee how to use it in minutes. Zendesk looks like a dinosaur in comparison, and had to train them for a few days before my employees got comfortable.

Cons

Not much to dislike. They have a lot of integrations built right in, and zapier fills in the blanks. The only thing I wish I had was the custom fields, which is in the PLUS feature, and I'd have to pay a bit more money for it. But can't complain about that.

Pros

1. The number 1 thing I love is that emails are "closed" once they are responded to. When I'm in my own email, I have a tendency to never delete messages. Then I think I need to sort into folders and so on, but that's a waste of time and messy. Help Scout automatically closes them when you've responded to it. But you can still search for it and find it. It's perfect! I get Zero in-box with Help Scout!
2. I also like that you can tag people (reassign) so my client can assign emails to me that she wants me to handle.
3. You can tag the emails, so once a week, she can go in and find a certain type of message to work on those all together.
4. You can write a common response and then save it to be reused.
5. You can write notes within message and tag the team member who you want to see the note, but the original sender of the message doesn't see the note.

Cons

I found it confusing at first because I didn't know where the closed messages were going, and I was nervous about closing messages, that they would disappear. But it just took some learning. My client who added me to her account was able to show me how it works. I'm not sure what the Help Scout training is like.

Pros

In my 20 years I've never come across such an elegant solution as Help Scout. Everything works good, looks good. Nice integration with E-commerce platform Woocommerce.

Cons

The messaging feature is over-priced. $50/month just for showing pop-up messages in your widget is a but too much!

Pros

I love all of the features that Help Scout offers. We're a growing CS department and it's scaled with us quite nicely. Our Developers are able to customize is for us and it's quite easy to use.

Cons

There are only a few things I don't like about HS. The main thing is that it would be nice to make article formatting easier to use with out HTML. And, it would awesome if they implemented a live chat feature, so we didn't have to use Intercom in addition to HS.

Pros

Love seeing all message threads with the contact to the right when an email is open
Like being able to star certain boxes so they show up first
Love being able to have stored replies
Like being able to keep notes that you can see at a glance upon opening an email

Cons

Don't like that it sometimes takes a bit for the numbers to refresh in mailboxes, from time to time.
Don't like that you can't order or resize the starred mailboxes
Don't like that multiple addresses for the same person aren't flagged somehow

Pros

I was impressed by the overall features and functionality of this product. In the basic pricing plan it allows you to create up to three support mailboxes and thus supporting three organizations with a single account. Each mailbox can be configured with an associated beacon, i.e. chat and customer support monitoring with customizable behavior depending on what end user experience you wish to offer to your customer support. Last but not least Help Scout features documentation pages which act as a knowledge base for supporting your users and thus eliminating support calls.

Cons

I would like to see more granular configurations made available in the aesthetic side of a knowledge base. I would also like to see the basic plan to support up to three knowledge bases out of the box without an extra charge beyond the first one.

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)

Pros

I use helpscout as a simple task management platform for a small team. I know there are other task managers out there but helpscout is so easy to use and simple in tracking tickets, assigning and closing, it’s all I needed to stay organized with projects and small tasks for my team.

Cons

I wish I could get more details in the reporting. Maybe I have fully used it to the full potential but I would love to have full reports on each team member and how long each task took them, and be able to see this at a glance.

Pros

This was the first customer service software we used as a team and it is really solid for being able to connect with customers through multiple points of contacts.

Cons

I really wish we could connect the entire customer journey within helpscout, it would allow our team to be more informed when dealing with customers.

Pros

ease of use, works on mobile, customer support. Overall it helps me stay on top of all our customer requests.

Cons

None! There is not a lot to say here. My only gripe was before there was no mobile app but now there is and its brilliant