TrustRadius Insights for Help Scout are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
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.
It was a easier way to keep communication with our members separate from our emails received from coworkers within our organization. Help Scout was also very easy to navigate and to itemize different emails into different folders to keep emails organized which makes for a more productive work day. Help Scout helped with our business, by, as stated above, keeping our members/clients emails separate from those received through our organization.
Pros
Organization of Emails
Saving pre-made emails to save time.
Ease of product.
Cons
I was always confused on some of the features including "closing" the email. Does that close (delete) on the other members end as well?
Likelihood to Recommend
It was greatly appreciated when trying to seperate corporate emails from those from our clients/members. Since we currently backed away from emailing our clients due to an improvement in our app, this is no longer needed.
We use Help Scout for our main source of customer support. From emails, to team collaboration, to chat - Help Scout powers it all. We have multiple email addresses that customers could contact us through. It got confusing by having multiple inboxes that needed to be checked. There was no way for team members to collaborate on complicated support scenarios. Help Scout helped us organize and collaborate on support tickets. We also use Help Scout as a live chat feature to help reduce phone calls yet still support our customers right where they are.
Pros
Live Chat
Multiple Inbox Organization
Team Collaboration
Cons
Onboarding (Dedicated CSM)
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Help Scout is our main system for member support, contact forms, applications and just about every other email communication with our company. It helps us keep everything in one place so that all of our team members can be on top of what is happening with each interaction.
Pros
Great interface for tracking emails & replies.
Tagging system is fantastic.
Love the workflows to automate everything.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
This would be a great system for anyone who has a lot of team members and/or a lot of customers to deal with. Organization junkies will LOVE the features!
We use Help Scout for the entire communications with customers and end-users. It is used for support tickets as well as for sales inquiries and other consultations. We mostly use Help Scout for managing the emails, also - creating and maintaining support article page (FAQ).
Pros
Simple and clean design
Easy to onboard new users
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
In my opinion, Help Scout is well suited for smaller teams.
Help Scout is used to facilitate communication between external customers and our internal workforce. Help Scout allows our organization to remain transparent, organized, and responsive. Our customer service teams and other customer-facing employees use this software to meet the needs of our clients, but also to remain accountable amongst our peers.
Pros
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
Cons
Lacks a spam filter
Would be useful to see email status variance amongst users
Blank marketing emails, potential issues with integrating internal software.
Likelihood to Recommend
Help Scout is ideal for multiple users with varying permissions. Has many functions that are well-suited to be tackled by a team or multitude of employees. There is a great degree of customization, including saved replies and app-integration. Software works well with remote teams. Help Scout does not seem to be necessary for internal use only, and also unlikely to be needed for a smaller organization.
Saintly Solutions has chosen HelpScout as our primary ticketing system. It is currently being used across our whole organization. One of the greatest features of HelpScout is that you can set it up so that it doesn't appear to be a ticketing system at all. It saves so much time by giving us the ability to sort tickets by age, produce productivity reports, and see customer satisfaction reviews.
Pros
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Help Scout is good for small, medium, and large size offices. The software allows for many team members to interact with tickets without causing conflicts. I can't see any organization where HelpScout wouldn't be a good fit!
<ul><li>Support</li><li>Customer Success</li><li>Billing</li><li>Product</li></ul>It allows us to have a centralized record of all customer communication. This gives the needed context for continuing conversations if a team member is out on vacation or moves on to another position. The tagging and workflows allow us to group tickets together and find trends in customer contact.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
HelpScout is great for all of our CX team. It allows us to centralize all communication and easily hand off conversations to whoever is available or best suited to handle the situation. The documents search bar that is embedded into the form when writing an email reply helps to drive the use of the help content by our team and by extension by our customers. They also have a great ecosystem of content and connections that help you to grow as a support team.
It is used across a large portion of our company. It is used to allow us to have a public facing email address for our clients that aren't our main Outlook email addresses.
Pros
It gives us great organization for our different departments and our coaches.
Cons
Setting up Help Scout with our Outlook can be tricky.
A mass import of saved replies would be nice.
Likelihood to Recommend
Its great when you have multiple teams that need to have public facing mailboxes.
My team uses Help Scout as our Customer Support ticketing system. We also currently have our Success Team and Billing department set up with mailboxes. The benefit is that multiple users can work out of a shared inbox, assign conversations, forward to different departments, and leave internal notes on conversations.
Pros
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.
Cons
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).
Likelihood to Recommend
Help Scout is well suited for teams who have multiple team members managing a single email address (i.e support@xyz.com). Conversations are easily assigned and escalated within Help Scout and internal notes can be left. I think as companies grow and scale, Help Scout is less appropriate due to the lack of integrations and pretty basic reporting.