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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Brand Embassy (discontinued)

    Score7.9 out of 10
    N/ABrand Embassy is now part of NICE inContact CXone (acquired May 2019). Brand Embassy is social customer service software designed to help companies with high volume social customer service prioritize and automate the customer experience. Incoming requests and mentions from social media, blogs and website forms are unified in one dashboard and routed to the most relevant customer service agent. Customers…

    $39

    per month

    Front

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/AFront is a communication hub that helps businesses keep the human touch in every interaction.

    $29

    per month per user

    Help Scout

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/AHelp Scout is help desk software. The vendor’s value proposition is that that their solution reduces time spent on training users because Help Scout is simple to use and set up and scales like any enterprise product. This solution includes multiple mailboxes to support as many email addresses as needed in order to work collaboratively across teams, and manage several products or brands from one account. Reports on conversation trends, team performance, productivity, and customer happiness are…

    $30

    per month starts with 100 contacts

    Pricing
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)FrontHelp Scout
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Starter
    $29
    per month per user
    Growth
    $79
    per month per user
    Scale
    $99
    per month (billed annually) per user
    Premier
    $229
    per month (billed annually) per seat (50 seat minimum)
    Standard
    $30
    per month starts with 100 contacts
    Plus
    $90
    per month starts with 200 contacts
    Company
    Contact sales team
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)FrontHelp Scout
    Free Trial
    YesYesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsDiscount for annual pricing on Starter and Growth plans. Scale and Premier plans are annual price only.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)FrontHelp Scout
    Considered Multiple Products
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Front
    No answer on this topic
    Help Scout
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Would buy again
    27 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    8 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    23 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    7 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    27 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    82%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    15 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    5 Answers
    Features
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)FrontHelp Scout
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Brand Embassy (discontinued) and Front and Help Scout
    Feature
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Front
    7.6
    6 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Help Scout
    8.7
    23 Ratings
    6% above category average
    Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings8.26 Ratings9.123 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings6.74 Ratings8.113 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings7.74 Ratings8.021 Ratings
    Ticket response00 Ratings7.74 Ratings9.522 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of Brand Embassy (discontinued) and Front and Help Scout
    Feature
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Front
    7.0
    6 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Help Scout
    8.5
    21 Ratings
    6% above category average
    External knowledge base00 Ratings7.06 Ratings8.720 Ratings
    Internal knowledge base00 Ratings00 Ratings8.219 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Brand Embassy (discontinued) and Front and Help Scout
    Feature
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Front
    8.8
    4 Ratings
    9% above category average
    Help Scout
    8.5
    23 Ratings
    6% above category average
    Customer portal00 Ratings8.33 Ratings00 Ratings
    Social integration00 Ratings9.43 Ratings00 Ratings
    Email support00 Ratings9.24 Ratings9.623 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings8.42 Ratings7.415 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)FrontHelp Scout
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Khoros Service
    Score8.5 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Khoros Service
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Kustomer
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)FrontHelp Scout
    Likelihood to Recommend
    2.0
    (12 ratings)
    9.1
    (35 ratings)
    9.6
    (23 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.7
    (5 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    1.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.4
    (9 ratings)
    9.4
    (6 ratings)
    Availability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    3.0
    (4 ratings)
    9.8
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Brand Embassy (discontinued)FrontHelp Scout
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    Though the strengths I listed in the prior question are really hopeful, the negatives outweigh the positives so much that at this time I could not in good conscience recommend this product. I really hope those issues improve - if they do, this would be a really strong tool for a customer service-based company like ours. Particularly one with so many people working remotely. For now, I'm honestly thankful I was able to take a different position here in which I never plan to touch NICE again.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Front
    I think Front is very useful for every company with multiple teams working together on different emails from clients. Not so useful if a lot of different teams need to work on a request at the same time, because when an email is sitting in multiple shared inboxes things can get messy. Also would not recommend for teams that work is individualized, as team work is the main point of Front.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Help Scout
    Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • Easy to understand and use interface with detailed perks for responding, evaluating and tracking user feedback.
    • Excellent and easy to generate reports with lots of relevant data for day-to-day operations.
    • Agent performance and team management.
    • Easily measurable KPIs thanks to detailed reporting.
    • Use of tags and sentiment help make analysis of customer behavior easier.
    Read full review
    Front
    • Even if you are just trying to compose a single email, Front gives a smart system that has options such [as] organized templates, tags, alerts, [and] changing your outbound dpt email.
    • Tasks- with Front you will not miss any interaction. When you are required to get assistance from a coworker, you only need to mention him/her and that notification will appear automatically in their inboxes.
    • Smart Notifications- sometimes we are just overwhelmed about the several notifications on our devices that we tend to miss some of them, but Front offers a new way to notify every email, discussion, mentioning, or tag that you really would not want to miss.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Help Scout
    • 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).
    • The email newsletter.
    • 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 trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need
    • Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • In terms of reports that we get from Brand Embassy, it would be great to have information about the number of cases, or conversations that we have with our customers. At the moment, we have just info about number of interactions and the total workload.
    • There are options to tag every conversation, in order to track why our customers contact us. Their tag menu is a bit too small, it would be great if it was larger.
    Read full review
    Front
    • Their integration to Salesforce is lacking. As the owner of our productivity tools and how they are used, I have very little control over what things to enforce, or even change what objects are available. For example, we don't use Cases in Salesforce but with the Salesforce integration the Cases object shows up. There's no need to have that there. I've heard there is a roadmap improvement forthcoming.
    • One of our uses is for our sales development reps to prospect with visitors. Because of the high volume of inquiries it's difficult for our reps to efficiently manage all their follow ups. It would be nice if we could run a "scheduled campaign" where a predesigned cadence of email follow ups can be sent automatically. To be clear, they do have a scheduling capability, but it just can't be used as a prebuilt option.
    • Integrations to other systems require you have a user account to those systems. We have SSO and therefore we don't always have a user account. For example, out integration to Jira uses SSO so we don't each have individual Jira logins. This is an outage for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Help Scout
    • Trying to group tickets is a bit unflexible. You can create folders which can be part of a workflow (automatic trigger) but you can't create a folder based on tags. This needs to be improved because there's a need to create smarter segments and mix them.
    • Metrics are useful but there needs to be more details about them. You can drill down in some but others are still not very actionable or visible (ok, that number went down, but what was the cause? what's the criteria with what you measure that?)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    I still use the platform: - its use is customer friendly - improves and speed up customer care on SM - improves speed and quality of internal processes/communication - monitor/measure all valuable metrics
    Read full review
    Front
    We are very happy with Front and don't anticipate changing
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Help Scout
    We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    Please see all other details from previous answers in this survey.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Front
    It's very easy to understand and use by new customer support agents as well. Be it a technology, product, or marketing person, we have trained most of the company folks to read and respond to customer conversations in their free time with the help of the Front app. It is also easy to set up for an admin and manage his/her team with communication rules.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Help Scout
    Help Scout is a great solution for support teams. There are many articles and webinars to help you learn how to use Help Scout. There are also many features to help make your workflows easier and more efficient. I would readily recommend Help Scout to any small or medium-growing support teams.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    It is difficult to describe just how awesome the support guys and gals at Brand Embassy are. Ever-present and eager to help, with kind and helpful attitude and you can really feel they are doing this to help you make results
    Read full review
    Front
    The support is good, and it's definitely prompt, but still lags when it comes to technical requirements, as I guess they are slow in developing newer features fast. So no complaints in terms of responsiveness, but yeah, at times it's not very helpful when you need certain features or are blocked on things which can't be unblocked.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Help Scout
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    Generally I don't see huge differences between social CRM tools - it's mainly in the details of how well it's implemented and connected to your channels. For example other tools cannot easily process non-standard channels like custom made forums or have a e-mail based ticketing for private follow ups. Brand Embassy shines in this area.
    Read full review
    Front
    This is something I am not familiar but it seems like it is [available] in Gmail. Thus I cannot give any feedback about it. What I am sure about is Front works for our team and I see Zoom using the service in the Customer Success Organization in a long run.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Help Scout
    Only have minimal experience with G-Suite for a much smaller company. This worked well for that organization but did not have similar specialization functions that suite our larger organization very well. Help Scout's pricing makes sense, and continues to service our needs well. Minimal usage of other programs, but have no need to explore alternatives at this time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • The first year when we started to focus on social care, we received 736 mentions. 4 years later we are dealing with 725, 942 mentions per year without the necessity to hire more people into our social care team. The seven of them are still able to respond to our customers very quickly and with high quality. And we believe that Brand Embassy is the key to our success in social care. Thanks to this tool we can simply manage such a big amount of mentions and questions.
    Read full review
    Front
    • Saved our executive team considerable amount of time chasing support questions through different channels.
    • Gave our team clear accountability for who was lead on a support issue and how to escalate.
    • Customer regularly say our support is the best in the industry.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Help Scout
    • We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Brand Embassy (discontinued) Screenshots

    Product screenshot

    Front Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    Help Scout Screenshots

    Screenshot of Build better relationships with your customers, and work together better as a teamScreenshot of Tools designed specifically for team collaboration on customer supportScreenshot of Docs Knowledge Base provides self-service that sets your customers up for successScreenshot of The conversation report can change the conversation with your customers from problems to praise by pinpointing what they write in about and when.Screenshot of Productivity Reports track your team's customer-helping velocity and identify sticking points to push through with even greater momentum.Screenshot of Happiness Reports are the closest you can get to your customer's true feelings without hiring a telepath.