Help Scout Reviews

Pros

Helpscout is our principal platform, as the vast majority of our customers require either a knowledge base or live chat help for their enterprises. Therefore, we provided them with a Helpscout-based knowledge library and made live chat available to them.

Cons

The platform's interface, especially the inbox UI, has a lot of room for improvement, and there is now just one knowledgebase template/design available, which is disappointing.

Pros

I really like how Help Scout simplifies the process of reporting, sorting, and monitoring issues for our staff. All of our staff members are comfortable with Help Scout, which is why we've adopted it for internal and external help. The integrated nature of the Docs sites is another perk; I appreciate being able to rapidly link articles and check statistics about which sections of our help libraries are most popular.

Cons

For our rather modestly sized support staff, I can think of no significant drawbacks to using Help Scout. I'd like to see a couple additional features in Help Scout, but for our current level of assistance, it's perfect.

Pros

It's easy to search, tag people/teams, and assign tickets. It also integrates well with our CRM.

Cons

It's often hard to follow threads and be able to see the initial conversation. I don't love the recent updates and we often had technical issues of our webhook disabling.

Pros

The price was good, but now I see why they charge so little.

Cons

They are constantly making poor decisions when designing updates. The last six months have been update after update that has made the platform harder to use for my agents.

Applying Custom Fields, an action that previously took 1 click is now hidden behind a collapsed panels.

Adding links is no longer a simple cmd+K macro. They replaced this standard keyboard command with their own internal "Command Pallet," which serves no use to our team.

They still don't have SLA support.

Pros

Love that you can set up multiple mailboxes and have multiple emails routing in to one space. The ability to see when a customer has viewed an email is also particularly useful and the search option is perfect.

Cons

Keeps disconnecting from apps and support couldn't fix it. No desktop notifications which would be immensely helpful.

Pros

Help Scout has been a great help desk platform for our business. Outside managing customer queries, we've utilized their workflow and saved reply features to semi-automate and fully automate several key areas. This has saved a lot of time and allowed us to focus on the customer. We've also been able to build our customer query management process around Help Scout and use this across multiple teams. It's a straightforward and easy-to-use platform that is intuitive in some aspects.

Cons

While their workflow functionality is good, some areas are missing that would benefit this function. It would also be great if Help Scout had an internal SLA feature which was broad enough to cover various SLA scenarios.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Help Scout

Pros

Keeps all customer communications in one place - allow us to respond to customers in almost real time

Cons

You have to pay more for intergrations into a crm

Pros

Easy to manage inboxes, AI features and managing guides

Cons

Communication history gets lost sometimes and customer replies don't appear

Pros

It increases efficiency in handling support through email.

Cons

My favourite part is the customer service. They handle technical issues in a superb manner.

Pros

I like that it helps me save time and convenient.

Cons

I have trouble when I try to use the mobile app.

Pros

The most important feature about helpscout is the tags feature which allow you track tickets better. As well as saved replies and the super friendly user interface

Cons

Helpscout does know allow to add multiple email signatures within the same user and it forces the addition of multiple users.

Pros

It has user friendly interface, multi-channel support and can integrate with other tools like slack .

Cons

It has very limited features.pricing is a bit Higher and has limited language support.

Pros

Client of mine enjoing the one helo desk solution. Where he can solve all support task.

Cons

I haven't figured out any limitations yet. Nothing we're missing.

Pros

HelpScout was the first shared emailing system we implemented that worked flawlessly with our setup. It rivals all other methods that focus on a ticket number approach but makes the communication process simple for users to grasp and professional yet informal.

The best part of Help Scout for us was the shared inbox aspect and the ability to collaborate with others easily.

Cons

Help Scout is expensive. In my opinion, it is overpriced. They started at a great introductory rate and grandfathered those rates for early-stage users. I heard from many users when they increased their rates, all of whom got a personalized message from the [SENSITIVE CONTENT], promising our rates would stay the same.

Months later, they recanted on their promise and hiked our rates. It was not a great feeling being lied to, and my love for the company quickly disappeared.

Other shared email services can replace Help Scout, but this is your best bet if you're looking for a simple approach and are not worried about the price tag.

Pros

I like that it is very easy at the eye, we use it mainly for customer service and e-mail threads are really easy to catch up on even if conversations are several or long. Also Love the preset answers feature, very helpful for general questions.

Cons

The thing I like the least is that filters are not the friendliest sometimes besides the filter you need to look further yourself for specific info.

Pros

Tracked tickets extremely well. Also the canned responses worked well.

Cons

The beacon on our website didn't work that well. There were often conflict issues so we just turned it off, which is a shame because it's a major feature we had relied on. After marketing en email as a spammer, we would continue to get emails in the future from that same email address.

Pros

After having used Zendesk for a while, I was not happy with its and complexity. I wanted to have a support desk tool that made it look like it was regular mail to the customers. And HelpScout did exactly that. After having used the free version for more than 2 years, we are now on the Business plan. It was great that we could have used it without having to spend money on it, but it's soo good that it's definitely worth every penny. The Docs integration is perfect, as we use it in replies to customers, in the beacon for self-help and we now also embed the docs on our website through the API.

Cons

It would be great if we could set a custom threshold for the spam filter, as we have a bit too many false positives.

Pros

They refer to support tickets as conversations, which might not seem like much at first but if you really think about how much you value your customers you will appreciate this verbiage.

They have offline/live chat support pop ups that they call "beacons" and you can have different ones depending on where a customer is at on the page. This was extremely helpful for me as I am selling software so having a beacon on the general website for pre-sales was a must but I also wanted a secondary beacon behind a paywall for premium support and their platform allows for this type of setup.

Lastly, most live chat companies only cater towards just that --- live chat. However, I wanted an all in one solution of live chat + a knowledge base. Help Scout has both available within their platform and it's super simple to setup.

Cons

The only thing I feel they could improve on is more features as far as layout and styling for the knowledge base. It was lacking in that sense but other than that I didn't see anything that I personally needed to be different.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Having used Zendesk for years, I was looking for a alternative option without breaking the bank. Help Scout has all the features i needed for my team, and more.

Help Scout looks/feels great. Everything is right where it needs to be. I can quickly show a new employee how to use it in minutes. Zendesk looks like a dinosaur in comparison, and had to train them for a few days before my employees got comfortable.

Cons

Not much to dislike. They have a lot of integrations built right in, and zapier fills in the blanks. The only thing I wish I had was the custom fields, which is in the PLUS feature, and I'd have to pay a bit more money for it. But can't complain about that.

Pros

It's your best solution on the market if you are looking to interact with your customers only via email. Really easy to implement and the CS is really helpful too.

Cons

It's really difficult to spice things up for the customer. Limitations are set rather quickly when trying to customize Reports or being proactive with customers.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Help Scout

Switched From

Pros

The customer support is phenomenal! The Help Scout team is personal, friendly, and fun- a pleasure to interact with any time I get the chance. But because the software is so seamless on its own, a rarely have to reach out for support. I most appreciate the reporting features that show conversation rates and customer happiness.

Cons

I would like to be able to export a list of customers I have spoke with over a set time period, so I would be able to automate outreach and followup. As of now, there is no established way to export lists or data.

Pros

We love that it brings all the communication into one central place to help answer clients back.

Cons

We do not like how forwarding of emails work and they always drop the attachments.

Pros

First, Help Scout gets major brownie points for "eating their own dog food" -- they are all about the Customer Experience, and they live up to this philosophy by delivering not only a very easy to use and modern product, but answering support inquiries right away (and thoroughly), and publishing an extremely helpful and insightful industry blog. So when you buy into Help Scout, you're not just getting a great software product, but also getting a great organization running behind it.

Aside from that I love how Help Scout does itself in fact deliver a great customer experience to our customers. It gets out of the way. Customers are not aware that we use it, in fact they believe they are emailing directly with me. Transactions are fast and lightweight, there are not many bells and whistles to complicate the process and slow down the support workflow. Help Scout made the hard decision to not allow custom fields on tickets, and while this at first seemed limiting, it has in fact allowed us to handle the ticket queue much more quickly, due to much lower overhead.

For delivering quick and helpful email support, I can't imagine a much better way to bullseye the task than using Help Scout. We've been very satisfied with it.

Cons

The Docs section of the product is a little bit underdeveloped, but adequate. It would be nice in that area to have more cohesion the way you'd typically find in a generic content management system (e.g. Wordpress). For instance, currently it isn't possible to move an article from one collection to another -- you have to copy its contents, re-build it on the other side, and delete the original.

That is my main complaint. In spite of that we have a full internal and external knowledge base hosted with the Docs feature, and it is adequate for our needs, if not exceptional.

Pros

I like the fact that this software integrates with my CRM so I can see all support contacts in the contact record.

Cons

The solution is robust but the thing I like least about the software is the pricing. It's a tad steep.

Pros

This was the first customer service software we used as a team and it is really solid for being able to connect with customers through multiple points of contacts.

Cons

I really wish we could connect the entire customer journey within helpscout, it would allow our team to be more informed when dealing with customers.