TrustRadius Insights for Help Scout are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Helpscout is a customer support ticket system that has proven to be invaluable for businesses looking to streamline their support operations. Users have praised its ability to centralize all support information in one place, allowing for improved efficiency and customer satisfaction. With Helpscout, customers' support tickets can be categorized and tracked, enabling the team to easily monitor metrics and identify areas for improvement.
One of the standout features of Helpscout is its simplicity and personal touch, which sets it apart from other help desk software. Customers appreciate the more human and personalized communication experience they receive when interacting with businesses that use Helpscout. Moreover, the software's support team is highly responsive and dedicated to finding solutions for any issues that arise, ensuring that customers feel heard and valued.
Helpscout is not only used by the dedicated customer support team but also by other members of the organization who rely on it for tasks such as checking customer information and reaching out to resolve issues. Multiple users can work out of a shared inbox, assign conversations, forward them to different departments, and leave internal notes - all aimed at providing efficient and timely responses to customer queries.
Additionally, Helpscout is used as a knowledge base and for hosting help documentation, making it easier for customers to find answers to their questions without having to reach out for support. The software helps keep all interactions in one place, allowing team members from various departments within the organization - including support, customer success, billing, and product teams - to stay informed about each interaction and provide continuity in conversations.
Overall, Helpscout has revolutionized customer service tracking and improved communication efficiency for businesses that rely heavily on email as their primary channel for support interactions. Its user-friendly interface, automated workflows, and easy collaboration between team members have earned the praise of both users and reviewers alike.
We used Help Scout as our primary platform for communications with clients and their employees who were participants in client-sponsored benefit plans. Our generic email addresses like customerservice@ and clientservice@ were pointed to Help Scout inboxes, in which our customer service representatives and account managers would collaborate to respond to a variety of inquiries.
Pros
The user interface is very intuitive. New users are able to be up and running on the platform very quickly.
Workflows, both manual and automatic, provide an easy way to customize the platform to suit our business processes.
From a user's perspective, it is easy to tell when another user is currently viewing and/or responding to a particular conversation with a customer, which prevents "stepping on each others' toes" in a shared inbox scenario.
When we need assistance with Help Scout functionality, we get fast, thorough responses to our inquiries.
The API functionality is powerful and well-documented.
Cons
I would like to see a better solution for the scenario when an external inbound email is sent to multiple email addresses within our organization. This is a common scenario that causes confusion because it creates multiple identical "conversations."
Likelihood to Recommend
If you currently have teams using shared mailboxes in Exchange to respond to your customer inquiries and are frustrated by the limitations therein, I would definitely suggest trying Help Scout. This is a great way for a team to work together to correspond with your customers.
We've been using Help Scout to manage email support in our org. While anyone can provide support via the gsuite offering, with help scout we can also have internal notes, mentions, reports or analytics, etc. This has helped us streamline our process, improve feedback to our product team and drive ownership within the customer experience team.
Pros
Email threading
Private notes & mentions
AI summary
Reports
Cons
More control over UI
Stronger features such as response prediction
Median response times in reports
Beacon needs improvement
Need data localisation/servers in India
Likelihood to Recommend
Help Scout is best suited in an org where email support is the primary channel. For orgs that may have more than one channel, another CRM that supports an omnichannel experience works best. However, Help Scout's beacon is also improving a lot
We use Help Scout as the main hub for our end-user support (technical and otherwise). We also use Help Scout internally to help triage internal issues across multiple teams. Help Scout is great because it's simple and intuitive enough for everyone to use and learn. It also helps us gather valuable data and metrics about our support.
Pros
Simple and easy to use
Accurate data and reporting
Cost efficient
Cons
Better integration options
Easier formatting for Docs
Text messaging options
Likelihood to Recommend
Help Scout is great for support teams that need a simple and intuitive solution. It is fairly easy to learn and can scale with your team as you grow. Help Scout's support and customer service is also great. They have a wide variety of help articles to help you figure out how best to use the solution to meet your needs.
It was a easier way to keep communication with our members separate from our emails received from coworkers within our organization. Help Scout was also very easy to navigate and to itemize different emails into different folders to keep emails organized which makes for a more productive work day. Help Scout helped with our business, by, as stated above, keeping our members/clients emails separate from those received through our organization.
Pros
Organization of Emails
Saving pre-made emails to save time.
Ease of product.
Cons
I was always confused on some of the features including "closing" the email. Does that close (delete) on the other members end as well?
Likelihood to Recommend
It was greatly appreciated when trying to seperate corporate emails from those from our clients/members. Since we currently backed away from emailing our clients due to an improvement in our app, this is no longer needed.
We use Help Scout for our main source of customer support. From emails, to team collaboration, to chat - Help Scout powers it all. We have multiple email addresses that customers could contact us through. It got confusing by having multiple inboxes that needed to be checked. There was no way for team members to collaborate on complicated support scenarios. Help Scout helped us organize and collaborate on support tickets. We also use Help Scout as a live chat feature to help reduce phone calls yet still support our customers right where they are.
Pros
Live Chat
Multiple Inbox Organization
Team Collaboration
Cons
Onboarding (Dedicated CSM)
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Help Scout is our main system for member support, contact forms, applications and just about every other email communication with our company. It helps us keep everything in one place so that all of our team members can be on top of what is happening with each interaction.
Pros
Great interface for tracking emails & replies.
Tagging system is fantastic.
Love the workflows to automate everything.
Cons
It is a bit slow sometimes, but not very often.
I've noticed more network errors with their server in the past year.
Small annoyance - they use a lot of lightbox popups and if you click outside the box all of your work is lost.
Likelihood to Recommend
This would be a great system for anyone who has a lot of team members and/or a lot of customers to deal with. Organization junkies will LOVE the features!
We use Help Scout for the entire communications with customers and end-users. It is used for support tickets as well as for sales inquiries and other consultations. We mostly use Help Scout for managing the emails, also - creating and maintaining support article page (FAQ).
Pros
Simple and clean design
Easy to onboard new users
Cons
I would the workflow functionality to be improved, because at the moment it is not working in all cases.
Also, I would like more flexibility with satisfaction rating functionality
More in-depth metrics and stats.
Likelihood to Recommend
In my opinion, Help Scout is well suited for smaller teams.
Help Scout is used to facilitate communication between external customers and our internal workforce. Help Scout allows our organization to remain transparent, organized, and responsive. Our customer service teams and other customer-facing employees use this software to meet the needs of our clients, but also to remain accountable amongst our peers.
Pros
Software is strongly suited for personalization and optimal individual performance
User permissions are so that employees and contractors alike can use without legal issues.
Apps are easy to integrate in the software
Cons
Lacks a spam filter
Would be useful to see email status variance amongst users
Blank marketing emails, potential issues with integrating internal software.
Likelihood to Recommend
Help Scout is ideal for multiple users with varying permissions. Has many functions that are well-suited to be tackled by a team or multitude of employees. There is a great degree of customization, including saved replies and app-integration. Software works well with remote teams. Help Scout does not seem to be necessary for internal use only, and also unlikely to be needed for a smaller organization.
Saintly Solutions has chosen HelpScout as our primary ticketing system. It is currently being used across our whole organization. One of the greatest features of HelpScout is that you can set it up so that it doesn't appear to be a ticketing system at all. It saves so much time by giving us the ability to sort tickets by age, produce productivity reports, and see customer satisfaction reviews.
Pros
It can be configured to look like simple email.
It is simple and straightforward.
It's easy to set up.
Help Scout has great support.
Likelihood to Recommend
Help Scout is good for small, medium, and large size offices. The software allows for many team members to interact with tickets without causing conflicts. I can't see any organization where HelpScout wouldn't be a good fit!