Help Scout vs. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service

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

Suitable for ticketing that might also require routing to 'queues' and capturing communication timelines. Not as suitable for heavily credentials-management-type organizations or organizations that are not on the Microsoft stack. Also, not as suitable for organizations that have very high needs for knowledge base management or organizations that do not have resources or a partner to help extend the capabilities.

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

• Routing
• Different Channel Support
• Intuitive user interface
• Continues improvement in the product
• Integration with other Microsoft services and products

• 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 occasionally crashes or slow down, but it usually works great.
• Costly.

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

It's not as simple as some of the other offerings, but it is fairly intuitive. The design philosophy is a little more bloated, but it can be streamlined by customizing views and forms (pages) to be organized for end users. Once it is set up, though, assuming your UI choices and design are intuitive, it is simple for end users to use.

Incentivized

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

I have worked with Oracle CRM On Demand earlier, mainly for case management and basic customer support workflows. Oracle CRM was stable and worked fine for standard use cases, but customization was limited and changes usually required more effort and time. Integrations with other systems were also not very flexible.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is much stronger in terms of flexibility and scalability. The biggest advantage is tight integration with the Microsoft ecosystem like Outlook, Teams, Power Automate, and Power Apps, which makes automation and productivity much better. Case management, SLAs, queues, and omnichannel features are more advanced and easier to configure.

• 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

• Creativity way.
• Foster increase in revenue.
• Improving decision-making.
• Culture of good relationship/service.

Incentivized