Help Scout

What differentiates Help Scout from other similar products?

The market is packed with variations on support software. Help Scout was easy to set up and use, and their company culture clearly cares about customer support, as they are a thought leader in the space.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

I love the smooth integration of the knowledge base with the help widget and the support inbox, allowing us to surface related articles based on the current page as well as search and insert those articles within a request dialogue.

What do you dislike most about this product?

As our use of this product has expanded across multiple departments, Help Scout has struggled at times to manage multiple users in multiple inboxes. I think the issues we've experienced stem primarily from users who reply to email notifications to add a note to the thread—because they are both users of the software (in a different inbox) and "customers" served by the software (from a different team).

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Help Scout does not have any community tools, but otherwise they offer a robust full-service software package, with thoughtful implementation of live chat, email and phone support, and excellent knowledge base tools.

What differentiates Help Scout from other similar products?

It has a simple and clean design, which makes it simple to onboard new users onto the platform. It has a great tagging system. It allows for multiple support channels and integrates with our help center. It has a more personal touch than some other platforms, like Zendesk.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

I love the support team. Anytime I had a question about something, I got a prompt and friendly response. I love that I'm able to see which tickets other members of my team are working on so we don't overlap. I like that I'm able to see my team's metrics so that we can improve on key performance indicators.

What do you dislike most about this product?

A salesforce integration would go a long way with reporting. I hated having to sort through the spam. I also wish you could continually scroll through tickets in the queue instead of having to go through multiple pages. A better review system. People are able to open multiple tickets and leave multiple bad reviews on the same issue, so our ratings get tanked. Sometimes we'd get an unnecessary bad review: for instance, a person sends in an email with nothing on it and then when we reach out to learn more then leave a bad review for no reason.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

This was a great product for our small support and CS teams. It was easy to integrate new users on. If you're looking for a reliable, easy interface with great workflows and a stellar support team, this is your product.

What differentiates Help Scout from other similar products?

The user interface is very clean and intuitive, which meant for us that getting new users up and running on it was easy with minimal training.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

The features that promote collaboration among team members and prevent users from duplicating effort. The "traffic cop" feature, for example, helps prevent users from responding to the same email at the same time. I also appreciate that when we have questions about Help Scout, the responses from their support team are always very kind, thoughtful, and thorough.

What do you dislike most about this product?

Occasionally we think of some feature that we wish Help Scout had, thinking surely other Help Scout clients would benefit from that new feature. But when we submit those ideas/enhancement requests, usually the response is that it "isn't on their road map." I understand that they have to keep their development efforts focused. I guess that's my only complaint.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Before implementation, do some deep discovery about which features in Help Scout would most benefit your use case. Ask lots of questions to be sure you understand the purpose behind things like workflows, tags, custom fields, etc.