TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Help Scout

Score7.9 out of 10

56 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Help Scout?

Help Scout is help desk software. The vendor’s value proposition is that that their solution reduces time spent on training users because Help Scout is simple to use and set up and scales like any enterprise product. This solution includes multiple mailboxes to support as many email addresses as needed in order to work collaboratively across teams, and manage several products or brands from one account. Reports on conversation trends, team performance, productivity, and customer happiness are included as well. The Docs Knowledge Base includes up to five customizable knowledge base sites that integrate with an organization’s help desk, and are designed to run smoothly on any device, and help their customers help themselves.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Build better relationships with your customers, and work together better as a team
Tools designed specifically for team collaboration on customer support
Docs Knowledge Base provides self-service that sets your customers up for success
The conversation report can change the conversation with your customers from problems to praise by pinpointing what they write in about and when.
Productivity Reports track your team's customer-helping velocity and identify sticking points to push through with even greater momentum.
Happiness Reports are the closest you can get to your customer's true feelings without hiring a telepath.
Help Scout iPhone app puts a powerful Help Desk in your pocket

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Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Help Scout has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 56 ratings of Help Scout's features
View all features

Top Performing Features

  • Subscription-based notifications

    Users subscribe to notifications for ticket updates

    Category average: 8.1

  • Organize and prioritize service tickets

    Prioritize tickets to ensure most urgent are tackled first

    Category average: 8.6

  • External knowledge base

    Customers can self-service by searching through help articles.

    Category average: 8

Areas for Improvement

  • Email support

    Integrates with email so that agents can send and receive information related to support tickets via email; email communications are attached to support tickets.

    Category average: 8.8

  • Internal knowledge base

    Internal knowledge base helps agents answer customers' support questions.

    Category average: 8.1

  • Help Desk CRM integration

    Integrates with CRM so that tickets and support communications are coordinated with customers' records.

    Category average: 8.6

Reviews

What users are saying about Help Scout.
View all reviews

So Much Better Than Shared Mailboxes in Exchange

Incentivized
Kelly TurnerView profile
IT Manager in Information Technology at Flores & Associates (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Help Scout as our primary platform for communications with clients and their employees who were participants in client-sponsored benefit plans. Our generic email addresses like customerservice@ and clientservice@ were pointed to Help Scout inboxes, in which our customer service representatives and account managers would collaborate to respond to a variety of inquiries.

Pros

  • The user interface is very intuitive. New users are able to be up and running on the platform very quickly.
  • Workflows, both manual and automatic, provide an easy way to customize the platform to suit our business processes.
  • From a user's perspective, it is easy to tell when another user is currently viewing and/or responding to a particular conversation with a customer, which prevents "stepping on each others' toes" in a shared inbox scenario.
  • When we need assistance with Help Scout functionality, we get fast, thorough responses to our inquiries.
  • The API functionality is powerful and well-documented.

Cons

  • I would like to see a better solution for the scenario when an external inbound email is sent to multiple email addresses within our organization. This is a common scenario that causes confusion because it creates multiple identical "conversations."

Return on Investment

  • It gave our leadership the ability to view metrics centered on how we were doing in terms of our customer interactions.

Usability

Great for growing support teams

Incentivized
Verified User
Director in Customer Service (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Help Scout as the main hub for our end-user support (technical and otherwise). We also use Help Scout internally to help triage internal issues across multiple teams.

Help Scout is great because it's simple and intuitive enough for everyone to use and learn. It also helps us gather valuable data and metrics about our support.

Pros

  • Simple and easy to use
  • Accurate data and reporting
  • Cost efficient

Cons

  • Better integration options
  • Easier formatting for Docs
  • Text messaging options

Return on Investment

  • Allows us to have quick response times
  • Allows us to train our team easily
  • Allows us to serve more end-users

Usability

Great for support could have been better for customer success

Incentivized
Verified User
Representative in Sales (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for support and customer success.

Pros

  • support
  • sending reactive emails
  • sending proactive emails

Cons

  • to have more options and tracking for customer success

Return on Investment

  • helps us to serve thousands of customers every month in support
  • hundreds of our customers also receive emails via Help Scout by our customer success team

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Intercom

Other Software Used

Intercom

Best e-mail support tool out there

Incentivized
Verified User
Director in Customer Service (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We've been using Help Scout to manage email support in our org. While anyone can provide support via the gsuite offering, with help scout we can also have internal notes, mentions, reports or analytics, etc. This has helped us streamline our process, improve feedback to our product team and drive ownership within the customer experience team.

Pros

  • Email threading
  • Private notes & mentions
  • AI summary
  • Reports

Cons

  • More control over UI
  • Stronger features such as response prediction
  • Median response times in reports
  • Beacon needs improvement
  • Need data localisation/servers in India

Return on Investment

  • Helped us build workflows on the fly to reduce spam
  • Workflows also helped us detect escalations early on and reduce impact on social media
  • Clean reporting helped plan our hiring

Usability

Alternatives Considered

DevRev, Fin by Intercom and HelpCrunch

Other Software Used

DevRev, Fin by Intercom, Freshchat

Great Product!

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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?

Usability

Other Software Used

Slack, BASIC Guru, Google Drive

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