Help Scout

Avantages

Extremely intuitive and easy to use. Learning to use Help Scout takes very little time at all. I enjoy the overall UI and simplicity.

Inconvénients

Reporting. As my company grows we have found that the reporting isn't as robust as we would like. It is pretty difficult to gain insight on particular customers who are reaching out and volume per account.

Avantages

This tool is very versatile and really snappy, I love how easy you can reply to incoming tickets and keep great analytics of it at the same time. We did the integration to Slack to keep it even easier and faster for our internal requests and products.

Inconvénients

It can come pricey if you are really looking to have a low-cost alternative for your customer satisfaction portion but this should be no downer since when you pay for this platform you get a quick and efficient tool, just be mindful of the costs.

Avantages

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 trusting them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little of the product, but as leadership that's something that I really need. Other environments—blameshifting—I cannot stand and can't trust, believe, or hope that they'll hold true to their promise. We're leaving another vendor for that reason.

Their system is very responsive, quick, simple, and easy to learn. There aren't too many bells and whistles which simplifies my life when onboarding new teammates. Their docs are well written and engaging.

Inconvénients

The vendor is great!

I'd say a better or more thorough live chat & phone integration would be great. We communicate with customers via email, phone, live chat, and Twitter. It's hard when all these are fairly decentralized. Help Scout *does* have a live chat integration (which we use) and we can forward VMs to Help Scout (which is great). But if you're looking for tracking call length, live chat length, or some of the other nifty metrics in one central place, you'll need to use Excel or a Google Sheet. Or use everyone's API to feed into your own system.

Avantages

The software is pretty easy to get setup and using, even if you need to transfer info from another system. It is a very streamlined ticketing system.

Inconvénients

It likes to stop functioning from time to time. You will go to reassign a ticket to someone and it'll take 10 minutes. It usually clears up after a bit, but for them to have just done a price increase for this product with no real enhancements (at least none I've noticed) its odd that this is happening so frequently now. They also made some changes to the reporting which at least made our lives a little more difficult for the type of reporting we were doing.

Avantages

ease of use, works on mobile, customer support. Overall it helps me stay on top of all our customer requests.

Inconvénients

None! There is not a lot to say here. My only gripe was before there was no mobile app but now there is and its brilliant

Avantages

Implementation in our business was very easy because the compatibility testing is all done in the background. As a help desk software, Help Scout is at the top of the list when it comes to implemention & integration.

Inconvénients

Sometimes it becomes evident the network struggles but rarely is it ever an issue. Additionally, many features feel pulled directly from other help desk softwares, but the features that set it apart are still present.

Avantages

Help Scout allows customers to send requests to a centralized email address, rather than to an individual, helping ensure that someone on the customer service end will be able to reply promptly. On my team, I handle most customer service requests. However, if I happen to be out sick, on vacation, or in any way unavailable, I can rest assured that another qualified person on my team has access to--and is monitoring--Help Scout to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Otherwise, a request might sit unanswered in my personal email inbox until I return. I also like that it's easy to store--and pull up-- information about the customer to see their history of past inquiries.

Inconvénients

Automatic workflows are somewhat complicated to set up. I've found them unnecessary for the most part, but I'm sure they could be more useful for higher customer volumes.

Avantages

I was impressed by the overall features and functionality of this product. In the basic pricing plan it allows you to create up to three support mailboxes and thus supporting three organizations with a single account. Each mailbox can be configured with an associated beacon, i.e. chat and customer support monitoring with customizable behavior depending on what end user experience you wish to offer to your customer support. Last but not least Help Scout features documentation pages which act as a knowledge base for supporting your users and thus eliminating support calls.

Inconvénients

I would like to see more granular configurations made available in the aesthetic side of a knowledge base. I would also like to see the basic plan to support up to three knowledge bases out of the box without an extra charge beyond the first one.

Avantages

Help Scout is incredibly easy to use. If it's ever confusing or difficult, their support team is amazing and gets back to you quickly with a complete answer.

Inconvénients

It's sometimes slow to load. I think they have issues from time to time and the interface feels clunky but when it's running smooth it is super quick fast!

Avantages

-Ease of use.
-It helps keep all of our service calls in one place

Inconvénients

-Since we are using it for service calls and not for help desk, it doesn't do all the things we would like it to do. It would be great if you could create forms that you could fill out.

Avantages

It's a great app for handling incoming emails - it gives you a lot of options on how to handle them, and it's easy to set up and to manage (even with a lot of mailboxes connected).

Inconvénients

The chat is just not working that great, it was old-fashioned, hard to implement, and just overall not a great experience for both customer and the support agent. Also, the analytics UX/UI could be improved.

Avantages

Easy to manage accounts, great for keeping records of a clients request, real-time request, great reports, easy to use and adapt. Honestly, I would recommend Help Scout, is a great ticking tool that has helped me reach-out to clients and keep communication rolling with them efficiently.

Inconvénients

I like the software when used on a computer, but the app for a mobile device does lack functionality. I would like to have the same options as I have on the computer. I don't want to be completely demanding so I won't request the high-end gadgets, but the option to see whos working on a ticket on the app will help a lot.

Avantages

I love the assign options and leaving notes to your teammate. It is pretty easy to use and this is our first helpdesk software on our team. Definitely not thinking of switching to others so far.

Inconvénients

The merge option needs some update. It is quite confusing at some point especially when you are handling a lot of support emails.

Avantages

- Communication feels natural, with no need for "tickets"
- Very simple to use, regarding both Mailbox and Docs

Inconvénients

- Embedded Docs is limited and does not support the same styling options as the microsite version
- Having to pay an extra for the new Beacon 2.0 when the former Beacon was included in the plan

Avantages

We don't have a complicated support team/process, and Helpscout has done the job for us. I love the templates feature (though I'm sure that's standard amongst competitors).

I am not wow'd by it, but I appreciate software that does what it says it will do, and Helpscout does that. I would strongly recommend it to anyone with relatively basic support requirements, only because I haven't seen in action with teams of more than 3, or for teams that require deeper analytics.

Inconvénients

They are working on a live chat feature, that will be nice when it launches. Using a separate tool for live chat is a little annoying, and I'd like to integrate it and track it alongside of email support.

Avantages

Help Scout takes the stress out of managing emails by providing a clean platform with simple features. It's easy to use and get new employees trained on.

Their workflows are an essential feature to help tag, add notes, and manage ticket.

Inconvénients

The tags are helpful but they can't be exported which China makes it difficult to track or manage their use.

Avantages

I love that multiple people have access to the same group and can work on the load of emails. It is a great way to team up and tackle those large inboxes.

Inconvénients

At times, I have to refresh the site a couple times to clear out the inbox after I have closed all of the different emails.

Avantages

In my 20 years I've never come across such an elegant solution as Help Scout. Everything works good, looks good. Nice integration with E-commerce platform Woocommerce.

Inconvénients

The messaging feature is over-priced. $50/month just for showing pop-up messages in your widget is a but too much!

Avantages

I really like their user interface. Their customer support is awesome. Also, if you don't want to communicate with your user with a real-time chat app, this help tool will help you to have a selling point too.

Inconvénients

It's a good product, I don't have any serious request. Just one, they can add a suggested part to manage knowledgebase articles in their admin panel. Now, we have to manage them programmatically.

Avantages

Help scout is easy to use. Tickets are easy to assign and manage. Setup is a breeze. And support is quick to reply. I also like all the integration options.

Avantages

Ability to format the support page to our liking. They continue to work on missing features to improve user experience

Inconvénients

The reporting part isn’t great. I would have to say that they need to improve this part to provide better insights

Avantages

You can search for emails for key words. I also like the read receipts when someone reads the email.

Inconvénients

I don't have anything i don't like about the software.

Avantages

Easy to use.

Inconvénients

No android app, but the web app is still quite functional on a small screen.

Avantages

Simple to set up, not bloated with loads of features, just enough to help managing incoming email to generic company accounts, assigning them to team members, or using automation to respond and filter.

Inconvénients

They've gone through a period of a rebuild during which I did experience a few bugs but that appears to be tidied up now. They've increased their pricing/removed their free plan recently but it's worth paying for.

Avantages

Help Scout allows customer service teams to powerfully work through incoming emails, as well as log phone calls. Robust workflows can route, tag, and prioritize emails as they come in, based on any number of criteria. You can also see who is viewing or responding to cases in real time, to prevent duplicate responds or work. Also has stellar API connections to connect to other software or CRM systems.

Inconvénients

Does not have live chat, but this is coming very, very soon. Once new rules/workflows are put in place, it can be slightly slow to reprocess existing cases, which might just be due to the incredibly high number of cases we have logged.

Avantages

When I used to work at ActBlue as a support associate, I really liked Help Scout's ticketing system. It was straightforward and less confusing than Intercom. Escalating and de-escalating issues was pretty easy. Help Scout is a huge help for customer service, people oriented folks like me.

Inconvénients

This is just a theory but I feel like Help Scout works better with certain email addresses than others. For people who have older emails such as hotmail, aol, or yahoo - their messages don't come across so clearly, which makes helping our customers and clients a real challenge.

Avantages

- Easy interface
- Lower learning curve
- Continually improving
- Good customer support
- All cloud based

Inconvénients

- Per-user costs can add up

Avantages

- Super simple user interface
- Built in canned responses make collaborating with the team really easy
- Ability to add notes between team members
- Merge feature between tickets to streamline operations

Inconvénients

- Load time can be slow when forwarding in emails
- No real-time notification when a new ticket comes in (you have to constantly refresh the page)

Avantages

Interface, easy to find the tickets that one is assigned or the new tickets.

Inconvénients

Not very intuitive when it comes to self learning. The original automated format would change tickets for me and on my first tries, I ended up responding to the wrong tickets or closing the wrong tickets.

Avantages

It's very easy to utilize with multiple members using at the same time. You can always see where other users are and leave comments to each other on specific messages.

Inconvénients

When copying in a new email to an existing chain (or when the HelpScout email is adding to an existing chain), attachments are usually lost and have to be reattached.

Avantages

1. The number 1 thing I love is that emails are "closed" once they are responded to. When I'm in my own email, I have a tendency to never delete messages. Then I think I need to sort into folders and so on, but that's a waste of time and messy. Help Scout automatically closes them when you've responded to it. But you can still search for it and find it. It's perfect! I get Zero in-box with Help Scout!
2. I also like that you can tag people (reassign) so my client can assign emails to me that she wants me to handle.
3. You can tag the emails, so once a week, she can go in and find a certain type of message to work on those all together.
4. You can write a common response and then save it to be reused.
5. You can write notes within message and tag the team member who you want to see the note, but the original sender of the message doesn't see the note.

Inconvénients

I found it confusing at first because I didn't know where the closed messages were going, and I was nervous about closing messages, that they would disappear. But it just took some learning. My client who added me to her account was able to show me how it works. I'm not sure what the Help Scout training is like.

Avantages

This software is incredibly easy to use! The macro search function was amazing. It allowed our team to search both the title and the body for relevant content. Very simple solution for our start up company.

Inconvénients

We needed more features, more integrations and more robust reporting as we began to grow as a company and support team.

Avantages

This is a very fast and efficient tool to use

Inconvénients

Well I find that the mobile application is to review. But overall I find it very good.

Avantages

I love Help Scout. It is a great resource to help you stay organized and allows you to not have to give your personal email/information to clients. Would highly recommend.

Inconvénients

I have no complaints thus far! Working great!

Avantages

I use helpscout as a simple task management platform for a small team. I know there are other task managers out there but helpscout is so easy to use and simple in tracking tickets, assigning and closing, it’s all I needed to stay organized with projects and small tasks for my team.

Inconvénients

I wish I could get more details in the reporting. Maybe I have fully used it to the full potential but I would love to have full reports on each team member and how long each task took them, and be able to see this at a glance.

Avantages

The email newsletter.

Inconvénients

How sometimes emails end up being responded to by multiple agents because they aren't automatically closed out.

Avantages

I love all of the features that Help Scout offers. We're a growing CS department and it's scaled with us quite nicely. Our Developers are able to customize is for us and it's quite easy to use.

Inconvénients

There are only a few things I don't like about HS. The main thing is that it would be nice to make article formatting easier to use with out HTML. And, it would awesome if they implemented a live chat feature, so we didn't have to use Intercom in addition to HS.

Avantages

Awesome metrics, queue delegation, folder and workflow application and tagging.

Inconvénients

No advanced formatting (bullet points). No way to export saved replies.

Avantages

I absolutely love the templates, and tagging features. Also the knowledge base was super easy to set up.

Inconvénients

I would love to be able to create templates for subject lines!

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Help Scout

Avantages

Love seeing all message threads with the contact to the right when an email is open
Like being able to star certain boxes so they show up first
Love being able to have stored replies
Like being able to keep notes that you can see at a glance upon opening an email

Inconvénients

Don't like that it sometimes takes a bit for the numbers to refresh in mailboxes, from time to time.
Don't like that you can't order or resize the starred mailboxes
Don't like that multiple addresses for the same person aren't flagged somehow

Avantages

Help Scout integrates seamlessly with any workflow due to its options for integrations and ease of use. I also love that it's easy to setup multi desk support, so that multiple people can serve a specific ticket.

Inconvénients

One aspect that can be improved is the UI, it hasn't received significant upgrades for a while, but other than that it's very clean so maybe it hasn't really needed one.

Avantages

Its User Interface, it is extremely simple and friendly. It's also fun, the little messages whenever you have a clean folder is always a great pick me up throughout the day.

Inconvénients

Its search engine, when trying to pinpoint specific tickets with certain filters, the filters sometimes do not work and fail to give a filtered search that's helpful towards finding context on a specific issue that's been handled before.

Avantages

Helpscout is incredibly simple with exactly what you need. This customer support software solves more problems than a cold one on a Friday afternoon.

Saved responses, tagging, automated workflows, docs (so useful I can't stress enough), reporting (we never use), great integrations and a customer support chatbot 2.0 (coming).

Inconvénients

The customer support chatbot is a little useless currently - but they're 2.0 in production is exactly the fix we need.

Avantages

It's very easy to keep up with support and help co-workers with tickets. It's easy to update the status and make sure nothing is falling through the cracks. The integrated docs is great for looking up error codes or messages.

Inconvénients

If customers respond to an email and reply with comments 'inline' with the original response, their comments get stripped out. And when customers paste images inline with their text it's hard to follow which attachments are associated with each comment.

Avantages

It's pretty easy to use. I was able to understand how to respond and set up templates without much instruction.

Inconvénients

There are a lot of rules to set up. Additionally, their iOS app doesn't have badge notifications. I get a notification that someone has responded to a ticket of mine, but there's no actual counter, meaning if I miss the notification, I would never know there's something sitting in my mailbox.

Avantages

It is a very easy software to use. It is super user friendly.

Inconvénients

It can sometimes be a bit confusing knowing what happens when notes are added as a direct message.