Help Scout

Help Scout

52 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Help Scout	Score 9.6 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…	$20 per user/per month

Pricing

Help Scout

Editions & Modules

Standard: $20
per user/per month
Plus: $35
per user/per month
Company: Contact sales team

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Help Scout
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Help Scout
Considered Both Products	Help Scout Verified User Team Lead Chose Help Scout I also have used Zendesk previously, which is much more complicated; however, it can offer much more possibilities for customizing. Incentivized Helpful? AE Amanda Elias Customer Experience Advocate Chose 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Director Chose Help Scout We primarily chose HelpScout because they were an affordable, moderately robust, HIPAA compliant solution. All the other options (e.g. Zendesk, Freshdesk, Kayako, etc.) were out of our price range or did not provide the necessary features that our team has come to rely on. Incentivized Helpful? Leigh Malamphy Manager, Support Chose Help Scout Help Scout is more reasonably priced compared to our other options. Incentivized Helpful? Taylor Hansen Support Team Manager Chose Help Scout Help Scout is a way better looking product. In the last two years they have stepped up their game. I hope to use their live chat soon. Zendesk is clunky and the user interface is terrible. Incentivized Helpful? Santiago Valdés Cofounder / Marketing, Growth, Technology, Experience Chose Help Scout This is tricky because there's helpdesk apps and chat apps (now Help Scout offers both). We first used just an email inbox (of course not scalable but we were very small), then we turned to Freshdesk, which was painful to use. It had some cool features but in general it was … Incentivized Helpful? 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. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Vice-President Chose Help Scout We liked Help Scout better because of the help center integration and ability to split out multiple inboxes. Incentivized Helpful? Jeffrey Schneider Chief Operating Officer Chose Help Scout They all had their positives and negatives. For us, it came down to signing a BAA (Zendesk wanted $28,000 to sign one). We enjoy working with vendors who can support healthcare initiates such as we are building. Incentivized Helpful? Jeffrey Cheng Web Development Lead Chose Help Scout I've tried almost every single other live chat support tool. Most of them are easy to plug and play into the HTML page layout, but in terms of usefulness and cost, a smaller startup will always choose Help Scout no matter what. It's easily the best option for a bootstrapped … Incentivized Helpful? Kaitlin Rawley Director of Growth Chose Help Scout We did test out several other support desk tools before finally deciding to go with Help Scout. The main tipping point was the fact that Help Scout almost appeared invisible to the end user (our customer). To them, it just feels as if they are reaching someone via email, not … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose Help Scout It has been an ongong debate about whether or not we should switch to Zendesk. They are all about prioritizing customers, delaying response time, and treating the customer like cattle. I'm sure we will switch someday because key heads in the company used to use it, but the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Vice-President Chose Help Scout My team used Zendesk for years and then we switched to a lighter solution. Incentivized Helpful?
Top Pros	Pro Team members Pro Keep track Pro Easy to learn
Top Cons	Minus Easier to work Minus Specific pages Minus Room for customization

Features

Help Scout

Incident and problem management

Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
	Help Scout 9.8 18 Ratings 22% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets	9.018 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications	10.010 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission	10.017 Ratings
Ticket response	10.018 Ratings

Self Help Community

Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
	Help Scout 8.5 16 Ratings 9% above category average
External knowledge base	9.015 Ratings
Internal knowledge base	8.014 Ratings

Multi-Channel Help

Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
	Help Scout 7.8 18 Ratings 2% above category average
Email support	9.018 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration	6.510 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Help Scout
Small Businesses	Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises	SAP Service Cloud Score 8.7 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Help Scout
Likelihood to Recommend	10.0 (18 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	7.0 (1 ratings)
Usability	9.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Help Scout
Likelihood to Recommend	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 SS Shane Siever Director of Product Marketing Read full review
Pros	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 Hammad Bin Idrees Acting Project Manager Read full review
Cons	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 Santiago Valdés Cofounder / Marketing, Growth, Technology, Experience Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	Help Scout It is simple and intuitive. I haven't run into difficulty using any of the features that I have wanted to use. Additional help in the form of documentation or support is available as needed, and their response times are pretty good :) Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	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 AE Amanda Elias Customer Experience Advocate Read full review
Return on Investment	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 Leigh Malamphy Manager, Support Read full review
ScreenShots	Help Scout Screenshots