HelpScout - the helping hand small businesses need to support their customers.
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 …
Starting at $20 per user/per month
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What is Help Scout?
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…
Recent Reviews
Popular Features
- Ticket response (18)10.0100%
- Ticket creation and submission (17)10.0100%
- Email support (18)9.090%
- Organize and prioritize service tickets (18)9.090%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Standard
$20
Cloud
per user/per month
Plus
$35
Cloud
per user/per month
Company
Contact sales team
Cloud
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.helpscout.net/pricing
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Census + Help Scout Demo
YouTube
Help Scout Releases iPhone App - Get Our Demo
YouTube
Quriobot & Help Scout integration
YouTube
Recreating Help Scout's Demo Webinar Promotion - Chameleon Recipe
YouTube
Shopify Integration with Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout or Re:amaze: Animated Overview
YouTube
Help Scout Help Desk Demo
YouTube
Features
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Help Scout?
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 included as well. The Docs Knowledge Base includes up to five customizable knowledge base sites that integrate with an organization’s help desk, and are designed to run smoothly on any device, and help their customers help themselves.
Help Scout Features
Incident and problem management Features
- Supported: Organize and prioritize service tickets
- Supported: Subscription-based notifications
- Supported: Ticket creation and submission
- Supported: Ticket response
- Supported: Automated responses
- Supported: Attachments/Screencasts
Self Help Community Features
- Supported: External knowledge base
- Supported: Internal knowledge base
Multi-Channel Help Features
- Supported: Email support
- Supported: Help Desk CRM integration
Additional Features
- Supported: iPhone app
- Supported: Embeddable Contact Form
- Supported: Customer Satisfaction Ratings
- Supported: Reporting
- Supported: API Access
- Supported: 40+ integrations
Help Scout Screenshots
Help Scout Integrations
Help Scout Competitors
Help Scout Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS |
| Supported Languages | English |
Frequently Asked Questions
TeamSupport and Helpjuice are common alternatives for Help Scout.
Reviewers rate Subscription-based notifications and Ticket creation and submission and Ticket response highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Help Scout are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(52)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
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.
Users highly recommend HelpScout for its great onboarding process, easy setup, and effectiveness. They also praise HelpScout's support team for being super responsive and going above and beyond to help. The ease of use, intuitiveness, and workflow streamlining capabilities of HelpScout are also commonly mentioned recommendations. Users suggest trying HelpScout and state that they haven't considered another platform since signing up. However, some caution that quality support from HelpScout may not be guaranteed and had difficulty getting answers to specific questions. Nonetheless, many users highly recommend HelpScout for SMBs that rely on online support, as it understands good service and small efficiencies matter. Users also find that HelpScout makes public relations management more effective and facilitates interaction focused on customer care. Lastly, users find HelpScout's desktop and mobile design user-friendly and intuitive. Overall, users highly recommend HelpScout as a terrific product that can streamline workflows and improve customer support.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-9 of 9)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 29, 2021
Your One-Stop Solution for Help Desk Management
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.
- Great interface for tracking emails & replies.
- Tagging system is fantastic.
- Love the workflows to automate everything.
- 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.
December 10, 2018
A complete ticketing system
Most companies using Help Desk software are in software development, tech or online commerce of some kind. We're in the boring, traditional business of a veterinary medicine practice, and deal with hundreds of emails a day from clients and the rest of the outside world. We're the only vet company I know of that uses a help desk. We use Help Scout and absolutely LOVE it. We did use Zendesk previously but found that it's way too complicated and not very personal. Pet owners don't want to be given a ticket number and feel like they're speaking to a robot. Help Scout solved that immediately when we switched. We have a lot of complex conversations via email that require multiple people being involved, communicating internal messages to each other about certain threads, etc.. Help Scout is absolutely fantastic, because it's very elegant in its simplicity, but tremendously powerful in its capability. On top of that, we've found their support team to be kick ass, highly responsive and always eager to try and figure out a solution to any issue we bring them. We are very loyal Help Scout clients and plan to be for a long time. It is extremely simple to use and understand as a user. It treats communicators like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers). It provides a fantastic support team that's very responsive and solution focused. It provides a solid API that allows you to bring in data from other apps so that you have a consolidated view of a client beyond just their email history
- 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.
- They're primarily focused on email so tracking chats and calls aren't that helpful.
September 24, 2018
Intuitive and effective. Highly recommend.
We use Helpscout for three purposes:
- As a customer support ticket system
- Docs for FAQ
- Chat (this is new in Help Scout but we are already on board with it).
- The interface is extremely good. It's fast, it's smart and it's easy to use. In one week we dominated it completely, with every function. It's very intuitive, which helped us onboard the hole team very quickly.
- Tagging and in general organizing tickets. It's easy and visible
- Workflows (or automatic triggers) have MANY options and you can get very efficient by using them
- Their support is very good and effective
- Docs (FAQ manager) is easy to setup and maintain. It is well linked with the other parts of HS, like answering emails or chat
- Chat is new to us (with Beacon) but so far is working fine. It's in beta and needs more features, but I'm sure they're on it
- 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?)
August 07, 2018
Helping Us Scout!
Help Scout was implemented across our organization for our external customer service. It revolutionized our tracking of customer service issues and allowed our staff to get out of their email. We now have a record of every conversation and nothing falls through the cracks! We highly recommend this platform for all organizations.
- Tracking of incoming emails
- Reports from tagging regarding common issues
- Keeps us out of email
- The tagging function is a bit onerous and took a while to strategize and set up.
May 25, 2018
Multi year Help Scout user - very happy!
Help Scout is used by our support team, primarily (8 person team). We use it to collectively address all incoming user tickets as a group. It also helps us to sort emails based on client type, keep track of what our customers are emailing about (using tags) and gauge the performance of our individual team members using happiness ratings.
- Different inboxes to sort emails from different client types which is very useful. We use two different email addresses for our paying clients and our end users, so it's important to prioritize those.
- Help Scout is constantly innovating. In the 2-3 years we've been using it, there have been significant feature releases that have made a big impact on our decision to continue using them.
- Integration with other platforms - we sync user data with HubSpot to get full context when corresponding with our customers.
- More detailed analytics.
- Ability to send customized surveys to gauge happiness.
October 12, 2017
YES to HelpScout
It is being used by a team of 3 customer service reps for receiving support and questions. Our team assigns the ticket to a person and they handle the discussion with the customer to build a relationship. We either respond to inquiries and close the ticket once satisfied or it escalates to our development team.
- Track users
- Set up a knowledge base page for FAQs
- Fairly easy for team members to get up and running quickly
- Widget Support - We currently use Olark and have to integrate with Helpscout. Why not all in one system?
- The UI could be a bit easier for tracking and see what is open, in motion or resolved.
- Be nice to color code unanswered support tickets and add timers to see response times.
- Analytics would be helpful to evaluate our customer support responses and success
April 21, 2017
HelpScout from web developer with support duties
Help Scout is used mainly as a support tool for our current users. Most of the time users write in with a question that they need help on and whoever is on support duty will take care of it. It can range from easy tasks to bug reports and all these tickets are saved so we can reach out to the once we finish helping them. Help Scout is a great tool to connect with your users and log the steps you take to help them. They've also released some new features such as the FAQ to mitigate some of the support questions we need to answer.
- Keep track of existing tickets to maintain a relationship between your company and its users.
- Easy to learn/use because you can literally pick it up within the first 15 minutes of logging in.
- Keep improving their product and roll out new features to improve the service.
- The user interface in the internal application could be improved as the buttons don't reflect intuitively what they are.
- Responding to a ticket should assign you as the owner if you are the first person to respond.
February 23, 2017
Hip hip hooray for Help Scout
We use Help Scout primarily with our support (help desk) staff, but one of our web developers also uses Help Scout when there is a technical issue that requires a little TLC. Help Scout is our main tool for providing excellent customer service. We do offer chat and phone calls for our customer service interaction, but our use of email with Help Scout is by far our largest channel for customer support and customer service. Additionally, we use Docs within Help Scout to host all of our help documentation.
- Allows for easy communication between support team members with the ability to add notes, assign emails, and keep track of who is viewing or responding to a particular conversation in real time.
- Their Happiness Report allows us to easily measure how satisfied people are with our level of support and makes it easy and natural to follow up with those who leave feedback.
- Their Reports for the Docs tool help us see where we are falling short with a list of 'failed searches'. We create new FAQs or adjust existing FAQs based on these 'failed searches'.
- We would really love to see the Docs tool go through a little facelift. The user interface has stayed relatively the same for the past 3 years and with a large bank of FAQs some of the category specific pages can see overwhelming to a user at first glance.
- We track our response time very closely and we will see this metric skewed from time to time if a customer replies to an old email chain instead of initiating a fresh email to us (normally they are writing with a new question/issue and it isn't related to the previous chain)
February 14, 2017
Read the Blog, then Make your decision
Help Scout is not just a software, it's a methodology applied to SAAS that focuses on being reactive to your customer's needs in a personable and meaningful way. If you want to look at using the software, I encourage you to first read the Help Scout Blog. It's full of great knowledge and every member of our team reads each new post. The UI is incredibly easy to use, you can utilize automated or manual workflows, and easily pass tickets between teammates. I can't imagine why any other software would be tempting. Our billing, support, success, and sales teams are all on the platform (but I would note that there are probably better sales platforms). We track all calls and emails through Help Scout.
- Love the HTML uploader.
- Workflows are bar none the easiest I have ever used.
- Solid platform that rarely has issues.
- Used to love their blog, an it's still good, but their older content was better.
- Added integrations would help in certain cases.
- There seems to be a persistent issue where you have to click right on the letter when using things like italics and bold. I have brought it up and they said they are working on it.