Item: Help Scout
Rating: 7
Author: Leigh Malamphy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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).

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Service Cloud and Zendesk

Help Scout is more reasonably priced compared to our other options.

Other Software Used

Talkdesk, Asana, Amplitude Analytics

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Help Scout for Customer Support

Overall Satisfaction with Help Scout