Help Scout

RATING:

4.6

(207)

About Help Scout

Help Scout is a dedicated customer support platform built for growing teams to deliver best-in-class customer service. When you sign up you get access to an entire suite of tools, all optimized specifically for customer support. Help Scout's shared inbox includes features like private notes and @mentions to improve team collaboration, and collision detection helps reduce duplicate work by showing when an agent is actively working on a specific conversation. You can automate routine tasks like conversation sorting with workflows and get additional context with customer profiles. If you’re looking to create a powerful customer knowledge base, Docs is right up your alley. The intuitive editor makes creating help center content a breeze, and built-in search functionality ...

Awards and Recognition

FrontRunner 2023
Software Advice's FrontRunners report ranks top products based on user reviews, which helps businesses find the right software.

Help Scout Pricing

Free trial available. Standard pricing starts at $20 per user per month. Standard: $25 user / month, or $20 user / month billed annually Plus: $40 user / month, or $35 user / month billed annually Company: $60 user / month billed annually Help Scout serves businesses from small to enterprise. Plans range from Free to keep everyone on the same page, to Standard for automation features and reporting, to Plus for advanced reporting & features designed for large teams. All Plans include 24x7 support, unlimited volume & storage, and 40+ third party integrations.

Starting price: 

$20.00 per month

Free trial: 

Available

Free version: 

Not Available

Manage all your team email inboxes, like support@, sales@, and finance@, in one tool.

Help Scout Reviews

Overall Rating

4.6

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

4.5

Customer Support

4.5

Value for money

4.5

Functionality

4.5

Most Helpful Reviews for Help Scout

1 - 5 of 197 Reviews

Greg

Verified reviewer

Veterinary, 11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review Source: GetApp

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed November 2016

Completely changed our business - for the better

Most companies using Help Desk software are in software development, tech or online commerce of some kind. We're in the boring, traditional business of veterinary medicine practice, and deal with hundreds of emails a day from clients and the rest of the outside world. We're the only vet company I know of that uses a help desk, and we use Help Scout - and absolutely LOVE it. We did use Zendesk previously, but found that it's way too complicated and not very personal. Pet owners don't want to be given a ticket # and feel like they're speaking to a robot. Help Scout solved that immediately when we switched. We have a lot of complex conversations via email that require multiple people being involved, communicating internal messages to each other about certain threads, etc. etc. Help Scout is absolutely fantastic, because it's very elegant in it's simplicity - but tremendously powerful in it's capability. On top of that, we've found their support team to be kick ass, highly responsive and always eager to try and figure out a solution to any issue we bring them. We are very loyal Help Scout clients, and plan to be for a long time.

PROS

- 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

CONS

- 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

Laurène

Computer Software, 11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed September 2022

Help Scout is great for small teams looking for a simple and inexpensive shared inbox

Help Scout is a great option for small to medium teams who do not want and overly complicated and pricy Help Desk software. It lacks some nice-to-have features but it will still help you provide great customer service.

PROS

Help Scout is great for our 4-person Customer Success Team. We have been using it for over a year and it helps us provide high-quality customer support. It is easy to use, our customers like it because our emails look just like normal emails. Their support team is great, we always get quick and relevant answers.

CONS

I think the reporting feature could really be improved, and we would appreciate a few more features to improve the daily management of support tickets.

Reason for choosing Help Scout

Help Scout looks more like a regular inbox and not an overly automated ticketing system. It is very easy to setup and use. It is also cheaper.

Reasons for switching to Help Scout

Gmail doesn't work well as a shared inbox.

David

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services, 2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

3

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

3

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

3

FUNCTIONALITY

3

Reviewed February 2022

Ticketing system feels abandoned

Day to day it works, but I think better products now exist.

PROS

It's reliable, and has most of the functions we need.

CONS

It feels like the ticketing system has now been abandoned as far as new development is concerned. There have been some minor improvements listed for their beacon /messaging widget but little of consequence. As far as I can only the email address passed to their widget is hashed, custom variables are not so bad actors can pass fake or malicious data to support agents. No UK or EU servers.

Reasons for switching to Help Scout

Too many bugs at the time

Shaun

Computer Software, 51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed July 2019

Stellar Support Tool for SaaS companies

We support a B2B SaaS platform in the Marketing Automation space and provide email support. Help Scout executes very well against the challenges that we have.

PROS

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.

CONS

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.

Reasons for switching to Help Scout

At the time, Intercom didn't have any concept of folders or prioritization and we grew to a point where we needed it badly.

Anonymous

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

3

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed June 2021

Great for starting with customer support

It was good, although we decided pretty quickly to move to Intercom.

PROS

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.

CONS

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.

Reasons for switching to Help Scout

Interactive, customer-oriented with direct integration to our website.