Help.com vs. Sparkcentral (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Help.com
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Help.com is a cloud-base live chat solution. The vendor says its in-depth reporting gives businesses an inside look at what is driving their customer experience. This solution includes custom on-boarding and training as well as a custom built chat box widget that is designed around the user’s brand.
$80
per simultaneous active user
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.N/A
Pricing
Help.comSparkcentral (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Help.com Chat
$80 per month
per simultaneous active user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Help.comSparkcentral (discontinued)
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsHelp.com Chat comes with unlimited logins and scales with your business.—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Help.comSparkcentral (discontinued)
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Help.comSparkcentral (discontinued)
Small Businesses
Gist
Gist
Score 9.6 out of 10
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Help.comSparkcentral (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(16 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(4 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
Help.comSparkcentral (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Help.com
Help.com is well suited for companies with sales and support departments who have the employee size to manage and respond to visitors chatting. I think a less appropriate scenario would be a company that does not have the employee size to manage the inbound chats as it makes it less valuable if you cannot interact quickly.
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Discontinued Products
Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential
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Pros
Help.com
  • User interface is clean and easy to navigate
  • Helpful support
  • Accurately captures information from the person you are chatting with
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Discontinued Products
  • The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
  • The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
  • Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).
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Cons
Help.com
  • Download chat transcripts easier
  • More pre-set responses
  • Canned responses
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Discontinued Products
  • In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
  • Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
  • The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.
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Likelihood to Renew
Help.com
No answers on this topic
Discontinued Products
Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.
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Usability
Help.com
No answers on this topic
Discontinued Products
The system meets all my expectations.
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Support Rating
Help.com
Help.com is easy to use, easy to train new employees to use, very helpful to clients and prospects, helps us generate revenue, resolve customer issues, and maintain a happy customer base. Being available at the convenience of your clients and prospects is necessary and Help.com helps make this possible without a struggle.
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Discontinued Products
Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.
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Alternatives Considered
Help.com

Help.com stacks up against competitors with their pricing, interface, features and support. I have used similar products in the past but Help.com is by far the best solution. I highly encourage you to use Help.com for your business and see for yourself why they are the best option for you.

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Discontinued Products
Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.
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Return on Investment
Help.com
  • Positive with inbound sales prospects
  • Positive with current client sales
  • Positive with customer support SLA
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Discontinued Products
  • Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen.
  • The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it.
  • Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool.
  • Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well.
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ScreenShots

Help.com Screenshots

Screenshot of Agent InterfaceScreenshot of Reporting DashboardScreenshot of Real-Time Monitoring