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Help Scout

Help Scout

Overview

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…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Helpscout is a customer support ticket system that has proven to be invaluable for businesses looking to streamline their support …
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Helping Us Scout!

8 out of 10
August 07, 2018
Incentivized
Help Scout was implemented across our organization for our external customer service. It revolutionized our tracking of customer service …
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Popular Features

View all 8 features
  • Ticket response (18)
    10.0
    100%
  • Ticket creation and submission (17)
    10.0
    100%
  • Email support (18)
    9.0
    90%
  • Organize and prioritize service tickets (18)
    9.0
    90%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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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
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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
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Features

Incident and problem management

Streamlining ticketing and service restoration processes

9.8
Avg 7.9

Self Help Community

Features that allow customers to self-service for support issues.

8.5
Avg 7.7

Multi-Channel Help

Features related to providing customer service and support via different communication channels. Communications are organized by ticket/customer/channel for the convenience of agents.

7.8
Avg 7.7
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Product Details

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

Screenshot of Build better relationships with your customers, and work together better as a teamScreenshot of Tools designed specifically for team collaboration on customer supportScreenshot of Docs Knowledge Base provides self-service that sets your customers up for successScreenshot of The conversation report can change the conversation with your customers from problems to praise by pinpointing what they write in about and when.Screenshot of Productivity Reports track your team's customer-helping velocity and identify sticking points to push through with even greater momentum.Screenshot of Happiness Reports are the closest you can get to your customer's true feelings without hiring a telepath.Screenshot of Help Scout iPhone app puts a powerful Help Desk in your pocket

Help Scout Competitors

Help Scout Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS
Supported LanguagesEnglish

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).
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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!

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

(1-6 of 6)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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).
  • Simple and clean design
  • Easy to onboard new users
  • 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.
In my opinion, Help Scout is well suited for smaller teams.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HelpScout is used by several of our subteams:
  • Support
  • Customer Success
  • Billing
  • Product
It allows us to have a centralized record of all customer communication. This gives the needed context for continuing conversations if a team member is out on vacation or moves on to another position. The tagging and workflows allow us to group tickets together and find trends in customer contact.
  • The workflows are really powerful and allow us to segment out tickets into buckets to increase velocity in responding to similar items.
  • The docs site is highly customizable and allows for a large amount of information to be easily accessible to our team and customers.
  • Beacon allows us to embed the docs content into our site itself and decreases the number of tickets that actually get submitted.
  • There are only 2 levels of organization in the docs sites. We cannot group the content into any more subfolder layers.
  • Much of the fancy targeting in Beacon is based solely off of URLs which doesn't work for us as a single page application.
  • The paging in lists of tickets isn't the most efficient. An infinite scroll would be much easier to work when you have a bunch of active tickets.
HelpScout is great for all of our CX team. It allows us to centralize all communication and easily hand off conversations to whoever is available or best suited to handle the situation. The documents search bar that is embedded into the form when writing an email reply helps to drive the use of the help content by our team and by extension by our customers. They also have a great ecosystem of content and connections that help you to grow as a support team.
Leigh Malamphy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My team uses Help Scout as our Customer Support ticketing system. We also currently have our Success Team and Billing department set up with mailboxes. The benefit is that multiple users can work out of a shared inbox, assign conversations, forward to different departments, and leave internal notes on conversations.
  • The interface/UX. Helpscout is extremely easy to learn and use. Getting ramped up on Helpscout takes very little time and it is easy to train new team members on it.
  • Support. Any time I have a question or something seems to be acting up in the account (which is pretty rare) I always get a quick response from Help Scout's Support team.
  • Workflows. We use this feature a lot to automate certain actions. For example, I have a workflow set up that triggers an email to be sent to me if a bad rating ever comes through for one of the Support Associates on my team. This allows me to quickly follow up with the customer to see what could be done to improve their experience.
  • Reporting. The native reports they have are good, but diving into data a little deeper is challenging. You really need custom fields or tags set up from the start to get specific data since Salesforce does not integrate into fields within Helpscout.
  • Knowledge Base. I wish there was more room for customization here. The current setup requires there to be Collections and Categories. If an article is uncategorized it is not searchable in the Knowledge Base. I also wish there was a feature so I could add "was this article helpful?" to report on.
  • Forwarding to other inboxes - you aren't able to CC the other user's email address (i.e if Support wants to forward something to Billing we are able to forward, but you are not able to CC the billing email address which is confusing to our customers sometimes).
Help Scout is well suited for teams who have multiple team members managing a single email address (i.e support@xyz.com). Conversations are easily assigned and escalated within Help Scout and internal notes can be left. I think as companies grow and scale, Help Scout is less appropriate due to the lack of integrations and pretty basic reporting.
October 12, 2017

YES to HelpScout

Jeffrey Schneider | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
I am fairly happy with it and it provides a HIPAA compliant layer which is crucial in our business
Jeffrey Cheng | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
From small to large teams, Help Scout is a wonderful asset to have. I've tried many alternatives but Help Scout is definitely the best bang for your buck. If you need LIVE chat, this isn't the best tool, but for general use cases, it's perfect. Zendesk might be comparable but I feel that's more suited to a large company. Help Scout is well suited if you have at least one dedicated support person and there's even a FAQ section and doc section for them to record the general responses.
Kaitlin Rawley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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)
Our team previously used a shared Gmail inbox for support, but as we grew and hired more employees this quickly became a nightmare. It was hard to tell who had responded to what and keep track of important details that were related to support requests. Help Scout is a great tool for providing customer support without all of the ticket numbers and other yucky robot like automatons that make people think they are contacting some big clunky system, not a real person. Their reports and tools make it easy to ensure we are providing fast, friendly support that exceeds expectations.
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