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.
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.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Customer Service (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)
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.
VU
Verified User
Director in Product Management (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)
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.
Our team used to use Help Scout as our help desk software. There were limitations at the time and we currently only use it for its knowledge base feature and our admin emails.
Pros
Very easy and friendly user interface. Always loved how nice Help Scout looks.
The reliability of Help Scout is second to none. The uptime hasn't really let us down.
The knowledge base looks pretty good once an article is posted.
Cons
The knowledge base is a nightmare to edit. The HTML editor is janky and needs an overhaul.
Help Scout was pretty late to the game for a JIRA integration.
Likelihood to Recommend
Love what this team is doing. Support software for and by people who care about a support driven company. Their blogs are amazing.
Help Scout is used by our support team, primarily (8 person team). We use it to collectively address all incoming user tickets as a group. It also helps us to sort emails based on client type, keep track of what our customers are emailing about (using tags) and gauge the performance of our individual team members using happiness ratings.
Pros
Different inboxes to sort emails from different client types which is very useful. We use two different email addresses for our paying clients and our end users, so it's important to prioritize those.
Help Scout is constantly innovating. In the 2-3 years we've been using it, there have been significant feature releases that have made a big impact on our decision to continue using them.
Integration with other platforms - we sync user data with HubSpot to get full context when corresponding with our customers.
Cons
More detailed analytics.
Ability to send customized surveys to gauge happiness.
Likelihood to Recommend
Great for SMB where the whole team needs to be able to collectively knock out emails as they come in. May not be great for organizations that handle thousands of inquiries per day.
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Marketing (Internet company, 11-50 employees)
Help Scout is used mainly as a support tool for our current users. Most of the time users write in with a question that they need help on and whoever is on support duty will take care of it. It can range from easy tasks to bug reports and all these tickets are saved so we can reach out to the once we finish helping them. Help Scout is a great tool to connect with your users and log the steps you take to help them. They've also released some new features such as the FAQ to mitigate some of the support questions we need to answer.
Pros
Keep track of existing tickets to maintain a relationship between your company and its users.
Easy to learn/use because you can literally pick it up within the first 15 minutes of logging in.
Keep improving their product and roll out new features to improve the service.
Cons
The user interface in the internal application could be improved as the buttons don't reflect intuitively what they are.
Responding to a ticket should assign you as the owner if you are the first person to respond.
Likelihood to Recommend
From small to large teams, Help Scout is a wonderful asset to have. I've tried many alternatives but Help Scout is definitely the best bang for your buck. If you need LIVE chat, this isn't the best tool, but for general use cases, it's perfect. Zendesk might be comparable but I feel that's more suited to a large company. Help Scout is well suited if you have at least one dedicated support person and there's even a FAQ section and doc section for them to record the general responses.
We use Help Scout primarily with our support (help desk) staff, but one of our web developers also uses Help Scout when there is a technical issue that requires a little TLC. Help Scout is our main tool for providing excellent customer service. We do offer chat and phone calls for our customer service interaction, but our use of email with Help Scout is by far our largest channel for customer support and customer service. Additionally, we use Docs within Help Scout to host all of our help documentation.
Pros
Allows for easy communication between support team members with the ability to add notes, assign emails, and keep track of who is viewing or responding to a particular conversation in real time.
Their Happiness Report allows us to easily measure how satisfied people are with our level of support and makes it easy and natural to follow up with those who leave feedback.
Their Reports for the Docs tool help us see where we are falling short with a list of 'failed searches'. We create new FAQs or adjust existing FAQs based on these 'failed searches'.
Cons
We would really love to see the Docs tool go through a little facelift. The user interface has stayed relatively the same for the past 3 years and with a large bank of FAQs some of the category specific pages can see overwhelming to a user at first glance.
We track our response time very closely and we will see this metric skewed from time to time if a customer replies to an old email chain instead of initiating a fresh email to us (normally they are writing with a new question/issue and it isn't related to the previous chain)
Likelihood to Recommend
Our team previously used a shared Gmail inbox for support, but as we grew and hired more employees this quickly became a nightmare. It was hard to tell who had responded to what and keep track of important details that were related to support requests. Help Scout is a great tool for providing customer support without all of the ticket numbers and other yucky robot like automatons that make people think they are contacting some big clunky system, not a real person. Their reports and tools make it easy to ensure we are providing fast, friendly support that exceeds expectations.
Help Scout is not just a software, it's a methodology applied to SAAS that focuses on being reactive to your customer's needs in a personable and meaningful way. If you want to look at using the software, I encourage you to first read the Help Scout Blog. It's full of great knowledge and every member of our team reads each new post. The UI is incredibly easy to use, you can utilize automated or manual workflows, and easily pass tickets between teammates. I can't imagine why any other software would be tempting. Our billing, support, success, and sales teams are all on the platform (but I would note that there are probably better sales platforms). We track all calls and emails through Help Scout.
Pros
Love the HTML uploader.
Workflows are bar none the easiest I have ever used.
Solid platform that rarely has issues.
Cons
Used to love their blog, an it's still good, but their older content was better.
Added integrations would help in certain cases.
There seems to be a persistent issue where you have to click right on the letter when using things like italics and bold. I have brought it up and they said they are working on it.
Likelihood to Recommend
We have looked at other platforms, and what they seem to offer is a false sense of superiority. But in reality, that sense is really just a poorly build UI with too many admin features. We are to the point that we have about 10,000 users, and we have had no issue with scaling. If you like the Help Scout methodology, their tool is the best for the job. If you don't care much about customer satisfaction, or quick responses, there are other platforms that have more detailed data feeds. We tend to favor Help Scout.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Customer Service (Internet company, 51-200 employees)
Help Scout is used for supporting end-users, creating FAQ/documentation & internally for customer development.
Pros
FAQ
Support ticketing
Reporting
Cons
Tagging system - too easy to create too many tags/labels, especially as new employees come on.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for smaller companies who need a more simple solution (vs. zendesk). Zendesk is also great, but only for larger businesses who need to customize a lot of the support tool.
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Corporate (Internet company, 11-50 employees)
