Help Scout vs. Parature (Discontinued)

Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.

Incentivized

Parature earns a "7" on my rating scale because it fits the bill for a ticketing solution. While it is not the most powerful utility I have come across, it is fairly user friendly and gets the job done. There is quite a bit of room for customizing the interface, but it comes with a learning curve. A score of "7" reflects what I would tell anyone who is looking for feedback on this application; it's better than a majority of the market share, but still has room to grow!

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Syncs all support emails into cases that can the be prioritized, monitored, and tracked.
• Provides easy canned responses to common support questions helping save time.
• Provides live chat.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Implementation- I think they have worked on improving this since we launched
• Custom requests
• Perhaps an interface with other business systems

Incentivized

We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.

Incentivized

We left Parature for Salesforce Service Cloud. While Parature was functional, as our business matured we needed better support, more stability, and a lot more features. In addition, it integrated with our sales, marketing, and finance department, allowing us to all use a single solution and be able to share information across departments.

Incentivized

Help Scout is a great solution for support teams. There are many articles and webinars to help you learn how to use Help Scout. There are also many features to help make your workflows easier and more efficient. I would readily recommend Help Scout to any small or medium-growing support teams.

Incentivized

It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.

Incentivized

They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.

Incentivized

Nothing ever seemed to get resolved

Incentivized

This is tricky because there's helpdesk apps and chat apps (now Help Scout offers both). We first used just an email inbox (of course not scalable but we were very small), then we turned to Freshdesk, which was painful to use. It had some cool features but in general it was ugly, slow, using the interface was very non-intuitive and the prioritization was hard. I have to say this was more than a year ago, so probably they have changed, but anyway. Zendesk is very expensive considering the features are almost the same AND the chat app needs to be paid separately. As chat we used Tawk.to, it was functional but metrics were not that good and it was buggy at times. Comparing Help Scout with their competitors, at least for us, made it a no-brainer to hire them. The price was very attractive considering the amount of features, the great support and the quality of the app. I don't regret my decision at all because Help Scout, unlike other helpdesk companies, tries to have their app "smart" and not a big, corporate thing piled with features. It does what it needs, it's easy to use and helps you achieve your goals regarding support for your customers.

Incentivized

Before choosing Parature we reviewed many of the currently available solutions before building our short list of Parature, SugarCRM, Zendesk, Salesforce, and NetSuite. In the end, the licensing models for Salesforce and Netsuite eliminated them from consideration. The SugarCRM solution was our current solution, and didn't appear to be a key area of focus for Sugar (though we continue to use SugarCRM for everything except the Ticketing feature). Zendesk lacked the Download Module feature which is a critical element of our deployment. In the end, it was Parature that addressed all of the needs we identified and did so in a single, hosted solution. It was also one of the least expensive to deploy and maintain.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Positive: everything is housed in one place, we are paperless and we are efficient.
• Negative: the bugs of this product make the above equally as frustrating. Also, some people don't use it correctly and going back and fixing their mistake is time-consuming. The reporting feature are also pretty flawed.

Incentivized