Help Scout vs. Hiver

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

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.

Incentivized

• 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

• automation through rules
• tagging emails, anaylics behind them
• support, chat always responds right away

Incentivized

• 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

• It could be considered expensive, but ultimately worth every penny for those who use shared inboxes/groups to run their business.

Incentivized

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

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

Easy to use

Support is there, can be slow at times.

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

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.

Incentivized

• 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

• 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

Incentivized