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…
TrustRadius Insights
Your One-Stop Solution for Help Desk Management
Great tool for small support teams
Help Scout Solving Problems for Growing Organization
Help Scout for the win!
All-in-one CX Solution!
- Support
- Customer Success
- Billing
- Product
A Great public facing email system for multi-service companies
Help Scout for Customer Support
A complete ticketing system
Help Scout Rocks!
Intuitive and effective. Highly recommend.
- As a customer support ticket system
- Docs for FAQ
- Chat (this is new in Help Scout but we are already on …
Helping Us Scout!
Multi year Help Scout user - very happy!
YES to HelpScout
HelpScout from web developer with support duties
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
Plus
$35
Company
Contact sales team
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Census + Help Scout Demo
Help Scout Releases iPhone App - Get Our Demo
Quriobot & Help Scout integration
Recreating Help Scout's Demo Webinar Promotion - Chameleon Recipe
Shopify Integration with Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout or Re:amaze: Animated Overview
Help Scout Help Desk Demo
Features
Incident and problem management
Streamlining ticketing and service restoration processes
- 9Organize and prioritize service tickets(18) Ratings
Prioritize tickets to ensure most urgent are tackled first
- 10Subscription-based notifications(10) Ratings
Users subscribe to notifications for ticket updates
- 10Ticket creation and submission(17) Ratings
Users and agents can easily enter new support requests.
- 10Ticket response(18) Ratings
Agents can easily follow up with customers.
Self Help Community
Features that allow customers to self-service for support issues.
- 9External knowledge base(15) Ratings
Customers can self-service by searching through help articles.
- 8Internal knowledge base(14) Ratings
Internal knowledge base helps agents answer customers' support questions.
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.
- 9Email support(18) Ratings
Integrates with email so that agents can send and receive information related to support tickets via email; email communications are attached to support tickets.
- 6.5Help Desk CRM integration(10) Ratings
Integrates with CRM so that tickets and support communications are coordinated with customers' records.
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Help Scout?
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
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(52)Community Insights
- 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
(1-17 of 17)- Live Chat
- Multiple Inbox Organization
- Team Collaboration
- Onboarding (Dedicated CSM)
Your One-Stop Solution for Help Desk Management
- 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.
Great tool for small support teams
- 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.
Help Scout Solving Problems for Growing Organization
- 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
- Lacks a spam filter
- Would be useful to see email status variance amongst users
- Blank marketing emails, potential issues with integrating internal software.
Help Scout for the win!
- 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.
All-in-one CX Solution!
- Support
- Customer Success
- Billing
- Product
- 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.
- It gives us great organization for our different departments and our coaches.
- Setting up Help Scout with our Outlook can be tricky.
- A mass import of saved replies would be nice.
Help Scout for Customer Support
- 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).
A complete ticketing system
- 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.
Help Scout Rocks!
- Very easy and friendly user interface. Always loved how nice Help Scout looks.
- The reliability of Help Scout is second to none. The uptime hasn't really let us down.
- The knowledge base looks pretty good once an article is posted.
- The knowledge base is a nightmare to edit. The HTML editor is janky and needs an overhaul.
- Help Scout was pretty late to the game for a JIRA integration.
Intuitive and effective. Highly recommend.
- 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 will help you with
- prioritizing tickets
- grouping all the tickets and information about a customer (past interactions)
- saving responses (and using them again)
- automating tasks (emails from X go to Y and add Z tag) [this is EXTREMELY useful and not all of the other CS have this for this price]
- adding an FAQ (Docs) which can be easily linked to the answers
- great shortcuts for moving fast
- seeing metrics of the performance of your team (in terms of NPS, response time, volume, etc)
Multi year Help Scout user - very happy!
- 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.
YES to HelpScout
- 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
HelpScout from web developer with support duties
- 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.
Hip hip hooray for Help Scout
- 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)
Read the Blog, then Make your decision
- 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.
- FAQ
- Support ticketing
- Reporting
- Tagging system - too easy to create too many tags/labels, especially as new employees come on.