Front is a communication hub that helps businesses keep the human touch in every interaction.
$29
per month per user
Help Scout
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Help 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
Hiver
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Hiver is a customer service platform that brings together communication channels, apps, and data to improve customer support operations. Hiver enables real-time collaboration across every customer communication channel, offering AI and automation to resolve issues and help teams work faster. Hiver states that over 10,000 teams of all shapes and sizes globally from Flexport to Harvard University, Vacasa, and Epic Games rely on Hiver to deliver support that wins and retains customers for…
$24
per month per user
Pricing
Front
Help Scout
Hiver
Editions & Modules
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
Lite
$24
per month per user
Growth
$34
per month per user
Pro
$59
per month per user
Elite
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Front
Help Scout
Hiver
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Discount for annual pricing on Starter and Growth plans. Scale and Premier plans are annual price only.
—
20% discount for annual pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Front
Help Scout
Hiver
Considered Multiple Products
Front
No answer on this topic
Help Scout
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose Help Scout
Help Scout easily plugs into Gmail and allows us to create reports based on our tagging. We found its price point for us as a nonprofit was a good fit. Customer service was also supportive. It also allows us to have an external help desk for our common questions from clients.
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.
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.
One scenario where Hiver works really well is in a shared support or billing inbox or anywhere multiple team members need access to the same messages. For example, when a customer emails about a billing question, we used to reply and manually loop in the billing team or forward the message. That often caused confusion, especially when someone forgot to “reply all” or responded only to the teammate instead of the customer.Now with Hiver, we just assign the conversation to the billing inbox, and whoever is available can respond. Everyone on the team can see the thread, status, and notes, which avoids duplicated efforts and missed replies. We also used to rely on Google Groups, but it wasn’t clear if someone had already replied, and there was no easy way to collaborate behind the scenes. Hiver completely solved that for us.As for situations where Hiver might be less ideal, I’d say if your team isn’t using Gmail or Google Workspace, then it’s probably not a good fit. It’s really designed for teams that live in Gmail so the team doesn't have to learn a new system. I'm sure some businesses will require a more robust ticketing solution but for our use case, this was a perfect option to improve outcomes, client service, and satisfaction.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
True ticketing solutions are certainly more robust in that you can typically manage social media channels and phones, etc. But, in my opinion, when you don't have a team solely responsible for managing a ticketing system they can be complicated to implement. With HIVER, we're already all accustomed to managing our own G-Suite inbox, so it was simply a matter of teaching the team how to utilize the solution.
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.
The ROI on showing how many emails are being received and addressed in a timely manner are great for KPIs
the ability to search and ensure emails are not being deleted as an automatic report is sent out the following day saying if any emails were deleted by whom
the ability to automate who gets assigned what emails from specific vendors per entity
