Intuitive and effective. Highly recommend.
September 24, 2018
Intuitive and effective. Highly recommend.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Help Scout
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?)
- It has had a huge impact. Thanks to it we can now centralize all the information, get to see if there was another case or past issue with the customer (so we can have more context) and it allows us to scale our customer support
- We shut down the phone assistance and only left email support. It was a huge challenge but so far we have been able to prioritize well the tickets from our customers. We use notes between us to manage cases and automate when needed, with workflows or saved responses (which save a huge amount of time).
- The visibility that the metrics gives us let us know where are we starting. It's a baseline to see where we can improve and more importantly, HOW. There's actionability on the metrics (room for improvement there, but for now it works) so you can see which topics, tickets, support reps, etc. could be working better. This is limited still (for example you can't cross topics with NPS or members with NPS) but anyway the information is useful and you can at least know HOW you are doing (which was a game changer for us, because now we have targets and goals)
- The Docs (FAQ) was very important in helping us centralize information regarding questions and work as a help center. This has 2 positive impacts: First, customers can help themselves, saving us and them time. Second, it helps the organization keep in sync and check them when new people join or a process change.
- Chat is new in Help Scout and we are still seeing how it works, but it helps to have everything on the same app so we can have more context from all the different channels this customer has contacted us and which information has been given to him.
This is tricky because there's helpdesk apps and chat apps (now Help Scout offers both).
We first used just an email inbox (of course not scalable but we were very small), then we turned to Freshdesk, which was painful to use. It had some cool features but in general it was ugly, slow, using the interface was very non-intuitive and the prioritization was hard. I have to say this was more than a year ago, so probably they have changed, but anyway. Zendesk is very expensive considering the features are almost the same AND the chat app needs to be paid separately. As chat we used Tawk.to, it was functional but metrics were not that good and it was buggy at times.
Comparing Help Scout with their competitors, at least for us, made it a no-brainer to hire them. The price was very attractive considering the amount of features, the great support and the quality of the app. I don't regret my decision at all because Help Scout, unlike other helpdesk companies, tries to have their app "smart" and not a big, corporate thing piled with features. It does what it needs, it's easy to use and helps you achieve your goals regarding support for your customers.
We first used just an email inbox (of course not scalable but we were very small), then we turned to Freshdesk, which was painful to use. It had some cool features but in general it was ugly, slow, using the interface was very non-intuitive and the prioritization was hard. I have to say this was more than a year ago, so probably they have changed, but anyway. Zendesk is very expensive considering the features are almost the same AND the chat app needs to be paid separately. As chat we used Tawk.to, it was functional but metrics were not that good and it was buggy at times.
Comparing Help Scout with their competitors, at least for us, made it a no-brainer to hire them. The price was very attractive considering the amount of features, the great support and the quality of the app. I don't regret my decision at all because Help Scout, unlike other helpdesk companies, tries to have their app "smart" and not a big, corporate thing piled with features. It does what it needs, it's easy to use and helps you achieve your goals regarding support for your customers.