Help Scout Reviews

- 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)
- fantastic support team that's very responsive and solution focused
- solid API that allows you to bring in data from other apps so that you have a consolidated view of a client, beyond just their email history

- wish that the interface could be a little more customized for our specific needs
- really don't have any downsides to it - it's a great product

Their entire philosophy is centered around customer satisfaction and success. This mirrors our own approach and it's great seeing that in action. They are also great at handling questions and service requests, and I love all the support and information resources they offer.

I wish the reporting functions were better and more detailed. Sometimes when something wasn't functioning in a way that worked for it, their response was suggesting a work around that would require a service plan upgrade when I figured out a work around that could work at our current level, but that is a very minor gripe.

This software allows extremely easy and efficient collaboration between administrators. The ticketing and email system can be configured many different ways and you can even integrate single sign-on.

There weren't too many things I don't like about this software. The only issue I have is that its report generator does not allow you to create reports for tickets cleared for each individual admin during a time period.

Ease of use
Knowledgebase was easy to implement
Ticket system works as it should

Our business needed customer management and HelpScout was not a good solution for that.

Help Scout does what it's supposed to do and it's very good at it. No doubt about that. It's the very main reason why many companies trust Help Scout for their customer support management. You can create automations, saved replies, a knowledgebase, and a chat widget (they call it Beacon). Everything works as it's supposed to and we never had any issues so far. It's really easy to set up automations and saved replies, no need to look into their help docs. You just need to use your common sense to navigate through the dashboard. I am using it daily for my client's e-commerce business for the past 6 years and I can say that it's a really solid product.

I also like their mobile app because it works really well. This is very important so you can attend to your customers even when you're not at your desk. Most customers want very quick responses and so the mobile app will be very handy when you don't have access to a computer.

There's no issue with deliverability as all our emails and replies went straight to customers' inboxes, which is very critical for this kind of app.

I found another software that has more features than this app and the pricing is also good. I wish Help Scout will have a feature where you can snooze or schedule an email or reply, and the ability to create embeddable forms. Also, I wish you can connect your social media accounts so you will be able to easily monitor your social media audiences when they message you or when they comment on your posts. These are available on the other software I found and it is a great alternative to this software.

Help Scout is purpose-built for Support teams which is fantastic. The features, UI, and reporting align closely with how we run our support team which makes things a lot easier.

We're big on automation and building on top of our tools and have been very impressed both with the workflow capabilities as well as the API endpoints and integrations that are possible.

The team behind Help Scout does a terrific job of supporting us, they have been extremely responsive, down to earth, and accurate in their replies.

To deliver a really good and consistent experience, the support channels of email, chat, and phone are very discrete and can't be blended as easily together as say a tool like Intercom (where we were coming from).

While a short-term pain for us, I think delivering better in each of the channels ultimately made us a more mature team in the end.

It was easy to get going and was the first app we used for customer service. It had integration with multiple other apps such as Mailchimp. Supports multiple users.

It was ticket-oriented, got us into working more with tickets than customers pretty quickly, not because HelpScout but because using tickets and emails for support.

There was no integration with our website, so this was a bummer.

I like that it is very easy at the eye, we use it mainly for customer service and e-mail threads are really easy to catch up on even if conversations are several or long. Also Love the preset answers feature, very helpful for general questions.

The thing I like the least is that filters are not the friendliest sometimes besides the filter you need to look further yourself for specific info.

This product is great for a small business or startup who needs to set up a knowledge base. It is simple to deploy, and there is a free plan. The biggest advantage is that it is easy to use and low cost.
Plus, they are very Startup friendly company.

There is no chat feature in mobile app so you can't send and receive real-time messages when you are on phone.

We love that it brings all the communication into one central place to help answer clients back.

We do not like how forwarding of emails work and they always drop the attachments.

I no longer get an email about an email that is about a forward of an email which was originally about an email that was about an email that was forwarded regarding an email that was sent.

Exactly..we have all had the pleasure of deciphering the shortened email snippet, forwards and the references to email threads that are broken but with Help Scout I now see it all..and see when..and where ..and who..Yep.. order to the choas of my many "conversations". And ohhhhh sooo much data hygine..i agree a terrible phrase but such a critical thing for any serious business. This includes a robust beyond belief search and filter feature. For those who appreciate effecient shortcuts and cross refereneced data points...yep tags..and filtering by tags as well. The bane of my existence is also the best feature which is the timeline transparancy that Help Scout brings. We all know who touched what when so we can not step on toes and if we try they put in the "traffic cop" feature to prevent unprofessional duplicate customer touches. Additionally, you can use Help Scout to assign voicemails to staff individual to deal with if your voicemail service offers emailed transcription forwards. Our staff also create conversation for intra office communications all the time to document timelines and details for reference later if needed. HS has helped us track everything from maintenance service logs to customer complaints and staff schedules.

This is only a tough question and one I would suggest come first when reviewing since after listing all the things i love and enjoy it helps me block out the uglier bits and pieces.. Besides some of the android app glitches that are more annoying than crisis creating I am still hard pressed to find many cons about using HS this past 2 years. has had a "negative" impact on my work communications besides the timeline busting myself for something

They refer to support tickets as conversations, which might not seem like much at first but if you really think about how much you value your customers you will appreciate this verbiage.

They have offline/live chat support pop ups that they call "beacons" and you can have different ones depending on where a customer is at on the page. This was extremely helpful for me as I am selling software so having a beacon on the general website for pre-sales was a must but I also wanted a secondary beacon behind a paywall for premium support and their platform allows for this type of setup.

Lastly, most live chat companies only cater towards just that --- live chat. However, I wanted an all in one solution of live chat + a knowledge base. Help Scout has both available within their platform and it's super simple to setup.

The only thing I feel they could improve on is more features as far as layout and styling for the knowledge base. It was lacking in that sense but other than that I didn't see anything that I personally needed to be different.

First, Help Scout gets major brownie points for "eating their own dog food" -- they are all about the Customer Experience, and they live up to this philosophy by delivering not only a very easy to use and modern product, but answering support inquiries right away (and thoroughly), and publishing an extremely helpful and insightful industry blog. So when you buy into Help Scout, you're not just getting a great software product, but also getting a great organization running behind it.

Aside from that I love how Help Scout does itself in fact deliver a great customer experience to our customers. It gets out of the way. Customers are not aware that we use it, in fact they believe they are emailing directly with me. Transactions are fast and lightweight, there are not many bells and whistles to complicate the process and slow down the support workflow. Help Scout made the hard decision to not allow custom fields on tickets, and while this at first seemed limiting, it has in fact allowed us to handle the ticket queue much more quickly, due to much lower overhead.

For delivering quick and helpful email support, I can't imagine a much better way to bullseye the task than using Help Scout. We've been very satisfied with it.

The Docs section of the product is a little bit underdeveloped, but adequate. It would be nice in that area to have more cohesion the way you'd typically find in a generic content management system (e.g. Wordpress). For instance, currently it isn't possible to move an article from one collection to another -- you have to copy its contents, re-build it on the other side, and delete the original.

That is my main complaint. In spite of that we have a full internal and external knowledge base hosted with the Docs feature, and it is adequate for our needs, if not exceptional.

Super easy UI. I don't have to train newbies on using Help Scout for more than 10-15 minutes. It's that simple to use.

VERY customer focused. It's not about a bunch of bells and whistles that are flashy fish hooks only intended to get bought by fishermen but not actually catch fish. Their product signs for the customer and the Support rep in it 8+ hours a day.

The lack of integrations. They just rolled out with a Salesforce integration, but lack integrations in other areas. Also, they're primarily focused on email so tracking chats and calls aren't that helpful...you would need to drop that data into Redshift, Gooddata, Domo, etc. to get much functionality in it. So unless you do that, you're stuck compiling a bunch in Google Sheets.

Caveat: if all you do is email and maybe chat, then this product is everything you need and more.

It's your best solution on the market if you are looking to interact with your customers only via email. Really easy to implement and the CS is really helpful too.

It's really difficult to spice things up for the customer. Limitations are set rather quickly when trying to customize Reports or being proactive with customers.

I like how transparent the experience is for the user and how easy it is to set up and use. I like the integration with the KB system to quickly insert a reference to the article.

Difficult to tell. I'm really enjoying everything on it, especially now that they added the live chat so I can stop using other software for that.
Maybe I'd love a more advanced system to manage the custom replies.
I'd appreciate if there's a better way to manage formatting inside the editor for the KB.

* You can setup online ticket support system for your clients very easy and cheaply
* Your support engineers will have everything they need to support your clients effectively
* No bloated unnecessary features, only those that you need

* Online mobile version leaves much to be desired
* No way to merge several tickets at once
* You can't make a note/reply and keep the ticket open, you have to re-open it.

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 trusting them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little of the product, but as leadership that's something that I really need. Other environments—blameshifting—I cannot stand and can't trust, believe, or hope that they'll hold true to their promise. We're leaving another vendor for that reason.

Their system is very responsive, quick, simple, and easy to learn. There aren't too many bells and whistles which simplifies my life when onboarding new teammates. Their docs are well written and engaging.

The vendor is great!

I'd say a better or more thorough live chat & phone integration would be great. We communicate with customers via email, phone, live chat, and Twitter. It's hard when all these are fairly decentralized. Help Scout *does* have a live chat integration (which we use) and we can forward VMs to Help Scout (which is great). But if you're looking for tracking call length, live chat length, or some of the other nifty metrics in one central place, you'll need to use Excel or a Google Sheet. Or use everyone's API to feed into your own system.

Help Scout is a focused, straightforward support mailbox product, and we've been using it to great effect since we switched over (from a shared inbox for support) a couple of years ago. We were happy with the pricing, and we use the custom sidebar add-ons to great effect. We've written our own sidebar app that gives our support team access to a ton of useful customer information and error logging without ever leaving the mailbox. When we've dealt with Help Scout support, they've also been great. Help Scout does exactly what we want.

Help Scout is a relatively slim and focused offering (although they are indeed adding new features all the time) this was actually a *selling point* for us, as we didn't want a super-complex tool for this but I am sure that for some users this could be problematic.

After having used Zendesk for a while, I was not happy with its and complexity. I wanted to have a support desk tool that made it look like it was regular mail to the customers. And HelpScout did exactly that. After having used the free version for more than 2 years, we are now on the Business plan. It was great that we could have used it without having to spend money on it, but it's soo good that it's definitely worth every penny. The Docs integration is perfect, as we use it in replies to customers, in the beacon for self-help and we now also embed the docs on our website through the API.

It would be great if we could set a custom threshold for the spam filter, as we have a bit too many false positives.

Initial setup is straightforward. We currently only use the ticketing/email feature in HelpScout, so setup and email configuration were complete in less than 10 minutes.

The interface is clean, direct, and getting used to the layout is quick.

We have synced our main Mailbox queue to a private channel in Slack, so each time there's a new ticket is sent there, which is beneficial to keep track of incoming tickets.

Working with HelpScout is simple and straightforward. Currently, we only use the ticketing feature, and it's been a gratifying experience. All the essentials like adding internal notes, tags, tagging other agents, and replying to customers are there.

My favourite feature is the search function, which helps you find that four-week-old ticket you closed a while ago easily just by searching a few keywords that were included in it.

So far, the only complaint we had was the "next" feature, once you reply to a ticket, the next open ticket assigned to you would pop up immediately, and if you're not careful, you might respond the wrong thing to the customer!

Help Scout allows customers to send requests to a centralized email address, rather than to an individual, helping ensure that someone on the customer service end will be able to reply promptly. On my team, I handle most customer service requests. However, if I happen to be out sick, on vacation, or in any way unavailable, I can rest assured that another qualified person on my team has access to--and is monitoring--Help Scout to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Otherwise, a request might sit unanswered in my personal email inbox until I return. I also like that it's easy to store--and pull up-- information about the customer to see their history of past inquiries.

Automatic workflows are somewhat complicated to set up. I've found them unnecessary for the most part, but I'm sure they could be more useful for higher customer volumes.

The software is pretty easy to get setup and using, even if you need to transfer info from another system. It is a very streamlined ticketing system.

It likes to stop functioning from time to time. You will go to reassign a ticket to someone and it'll take 10 minutes. It usually clears up after a bit, but for them to have just done a price increase for this product with no real enhancements (at least none I've noticed) its odd that this is happening so frequently now. They also made some changes to the reporting which at least made our lives a little more difficult for the type of reporting we were doing.

When I used to work at ActBlue as a support associate, I really liked Help Scout's ticketing system. It was straightforward and less confusing than Intercom. Escalating and de-escalating issues was pretty easy. Help Scout is a huge help for customer service, people oriented folks like me.

This is just a theory but I feel like Help Scout works better with certain email addresses than others. For people who have older emails such as hotmail, aol, or yahoo - their messages don't come across so clearly, which makes helping our customers and clients a real challenge.

First of all, Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way. The UI is great (especially since 2015) and the workflows are easy to learn and relatively powerful. Keyboard shortcuts are killer. But most of all, I love that Help Scout doesn't feel "heavy" or "dated". It feels modern, fast, and clean. And the support people are just plain awesome. Oh, and did I mention their blog posts?

Like many companies, they had to grow to keep up with their customer base - which is awesome! But some of their new hires weren't the greatest at support (ironic, eh?). Also, they've had a fair share of downtime recently, though they've been excellent at communicating and building confidence even through these rough times.