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.

- 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

It's a great platform for small to medium scales businesses looking for a help desk platform. It has some key features which cover the majority of everyday needs with the added benefits of additional items which could be used as you expand.

Help Scout has been a great help desk platform for our business. Outside managing customer queries, we've utilized their workflow and saved reply features to semi-automate and fully automate several key areas. This has saved a lot of time and allowed us to focus on the customer. We've also been able to build our customer query management process around Help Scout and use this across multiple teams. It's a straightforward and easy-to-use platform that is intuitive in some aspects.

While their workflow functionality is good, some areas are missing that would benefit this function. It would also be great if Help Scout had an internal SLA feature which was broad enough to cover various SLA scenarios.

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

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

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.

Excellent. While there is some admittedly cool functionality that other CRMs offer at higher prices, they don't make sense for our current business needs and you really can't beat Helpscout when it comes to their customer service and help resources. It's excellent working with a team who really care what their customers and their customers' customers think.

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.

Help Using Scout, you can easily categorize your support requests and generate customized reports for each inbox. We can track the growth of our user base, learn about the challenges our clients have, and observe how our support practices evolve thanks to the reporting tools. It also facilitates reporting on key performance indicators for our business, such as average response and resolution times.

I really like how Help Scout simplifies the process of reporting, sorting, and monitoring issues for our staff. All of our staff members are comfortable with Help Scout, which is why we've adopted it for internal and external help. The integrated nature of the Docs sites is another perk; I appreciate being able to rapidly link articles and check statistics about which sections of our help libraries are most popular.

For our rather modestly sized support staff, I can think of no significant drawbacks to using Help Scout. I'd like to see a couple additional features in Help Scout, but for our current level of assistance, it's perfect.

It was truly great: managing emails and knowledge base, getting reports, adding in-app tooltips - all of that worked flawlessly, and in rare occasions in which I had to contact their support, it was one of the best experiences as well. If I could choose the tool to handle customer support again, I would go for Help Scout - and I suggest you (aka the reader) to do just that!

It makes managing incoming cases feel good - I've tried and seen other tools used primarily for customer support, and none of them were comparable to Help Scout for me. In Help Scout the entire UI puts the focus on serving the customer right, being light on unnecessary noise. Might sound cheesy, but somehow lets you connect better with the person on the other side of the screen.

That I had to stop using it recently :( Other than that I didn't really find anything that I disliked there.

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.

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.

Help Scout has treated our company great. It has given us room to grow while helping us manage technology needs along the way.

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.

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

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.

It automates the entire customer relations process. A customer relationship management platform, livechat, customer support tickets...

Too many functions can make it a little difficult for beginners to get to grips with the interface

I was given the chance to use Help Scout for monitoring consumer enquiries and support requests during my internship at the university's Department of Pharmaceutical Development and Research. The program succeeded in resolving client issues effectively and assuring prompt responses. We were able to deliver cogent and consistent client service because to its collaborative inbox function, which enabled easy communication among the support team. We were able to measure customer satisfaction numbers and pinpoint areas for improvement thanks to Help Scout's reporting and analytics features. Overall, Help Scout's user-friendly interface and extensive capabilities significantly improved the customer assistance experience inside our department.

A robust feature set provided by Help Scout is revolutionizing customer support administration. Its user-friendly interface enables seamless ticket administration, providing effective and well-organized customer contact. Teams can work together on client queries using the software's collaborative inbox, which leads to quicker responses and more customer satisfaction. Help Scout's automation features automate monotonous operations to give support workers more time. Additionally, it offers meaningful insights into customer service effectiveness through its extensive reporting and analytics. Businesses may quickly link their preferred products to Help Scout's vast integration possibilities and design a unique support environment. Overall, Help Scout improves efficiency, streamlines customer support processes, and improves the client experience.

There are some restrictions to take into account, despite the fact that Help Scout has several advantages. The absence of native phone and chat support tools, which may be essential for enterprises needing real-time client communication, is one downside. Furthermore, learning the sophisticated functions of Help Scout might have a steep learning curve for new users, demanding rigorous onboarding and training. Periodic bugs and poor system performance have been reported by certain users, which can reduce productivity. Last but not least, the pricing structure can be a problem for startups or small firms with tight funds. Help Scout is a top option for customer support management in spite of these shortcomings thanks to its total value and robust feature set.

I started my career as a support engineer, I used several ticket systems (simple support, kayako, zendesk, some others) and quite familiar with them. When I started to use help scout, I was quite impressed with it. It's very simple, yet it gives the support engineer all the things you need (add comments, canned replies, re-assigning, automatic actions, etc). Also it's very affordable and easy to start using. In fact, when one of my friends asked me for a simple support system, I did recommend him Help Scout. It definitely is better to pay them a small buck, rather than spending your time and effort on purchasing some big system, installing it on your own servers and customising it. There are some minor things that I'd be happy if help scout improve upon, but otherwise I'm very happy with them.

* 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.

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.

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.

Our company uses HelpScout as its internal Help Desk for all of our associate's requests/needs such as equipment request, payroll inquiries, BYOD access, and so. We found HelpScout incredibly useful; it has increased our response time and productivity, and we are starting to build our internal Knowledge Base. Moreover, most importantly, the price is affordable and goes along well our needs.

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 serves its purpose well. And I like the fun congratulatory messages it gives anytime a folder is cleared out. All in all a good product.

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.

Having tried or reviewed every customer support solution we could find, we have found Help Scout to be the best solution because of it being as simple to use as regular email, yet powerful enough to handle all of our company's communication. Help Scout is the key tool we use in our web development and hosting business, handling all of our client communication and allowing us to easily discuss requests internally, pass around messages, and provide quicker response times to our clients while making our lives easier. Additionally, the customer support Help Scout provides is the best we've ever seen. They are super friendly, very quick to respond, and understand requests the first time. They are the model for customer support, and they even blog regularly about how to provide great customer support with very useful tips.

We've used a number of ticket systems and found Helpscout best meets our needs. The integration options are easy to set up and increases the value we get from the software. The support is quick and always helpful.

Its ease of use, great search with keywords in the help guide area of clients. The ticketing system is great and integrates with Infusinsoft and Trello so we can transfer information between teams. The reporting is also useful for creating guides based on real search terms.

A recycle bin for deleted guides would be useful and more control over the look and feel or the canned replies.

1. The number 1 thing I love is that emails are "closed" once they are responded to. When I'm in my own email, I have a tendency to never delete messages. Then I think I need to sort into folders and so on, but that's a waste of time and messy. Help Scout automatically closes them when you've responded to it. But you can still search for it and find it. It's perfect! I get Zero in-box with Help Scout! 2. I also like that you can tag people (reassign) so my client can assign emails to me that she wants me to handle. 3. You can tag the emails, so once a week, she can go in and find a certain type of message to work on those all together. 4. You can write a common response and then save it to be reused. 5. You can write notes within message and tag the team member who you want to see the note, but the original sender of the message doesn't see the note.

I found it confusing at first because I didn't know where the closed messages were going, and I was nervous about closing messages, that they would disappear. But it just took some learning. My client who added me to her account was able to show me how it works. I'm not sure what the Help Scout training is like.

I liked how simple it was to use Help Scout. It had a simple, clean design that was easy to navigate, and the customer service representatives were extremely helpful and knowledgeable. It was also convenient that the help desk was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so I could get assistance whenever I needed it.

The lack of customization options was the least appealing aspect of Help Scout to me. The platform is quite limited in terms of customizing the look and feel of the customer service experience. Furthermore, the customer service representatives appeared to be unfamiliar with product and its features.

Help Scout is easy to use, has some great metrics, makes organization a breeze, and allows companies to standardize email responses. But in all honesty, my favorite thing about Help Scout is the weekly newsletter they send out via email. It may be more or less often than weekly, I'm not entirely sure; however, I just love it! I almost always read the entire thing. It focuses on one topic, it's always helpful, and it's often strangely timely so far as what's going on in my professional and/or personal life. I've found it really useful. Indeed, two Christmases ago, my list included multiple items I learned about one of Help Scout's newsletters!

The email newsletter.

How sometimes emails end up being responded to by multiple agents because they aren't automatically closed out.

A clean UI that has obviously been well thought through. They iterate and add features routinely and are very proactive in communicating with their customers. For example, I had discovered a bug, which they confirmed and rolled out a fix within 48 hours. There are small reminders and tips presented within the context of the app, which are very helpful (eg. helping the user in distinguishing between an internal comment and a customer reply - this is very useful). Overall, there is great value for the money, I would strongly recommend Help Scout as a help desk/customer facing communication tool.

IMAP integration for outgoing e-mail archiving would be highly valued. Only Gmail is supported at this time.

Help Scout is a very user intuitive and helpful tool to keep all your customer support interactions gathered and managed in a single place. Very responsive and easy to use Web app console which I am making use of on a daily basis.

I was impressed by the overall features and functionality of this product. In the basic pricing plan it allows you to create up to three support mailboxes and thus supporting three organizations with a single account. Each mailbox can be configured with an associated beacon, i.e. chat and customer support monitoring with customizable behavior depending on what end user experience you wish to offer to your customer support. Last but not least Help Scout features documentation pages which act as a knowledge base for supporting your users and thus eliminating support calls.

I would like to see more granular configurations made available in the aesthetic side of a knowledge base. I would also like to see the basic plan to support up to three knowledge bases out of the box without an extra charge beyond the first one.

I needed a customer service software that I could use with my team. I also had to be able to integrate my other applications like MailChimp and Slack. I was looking for a software that was simple to use, but powerful at scale. After a lot of research, I chose Help Scout. It was easy to use, simple to deploy and integrate with other things that I needed.

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.

It's very easy to utilize with multiple members using at the same time. You can always see where other users are and leave comments to each other on specific messages.

When copying in a new email to an existing chain (or when the HelpScout email is adding to an existing chain), attachments are usually lost and have to be reattached.