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

Great customer focused company to work with!

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

I preferred Dropbox

Pros

I thought the website design was clean and attractive.

Cons

I only used it in training, but I didn't like the way the knowledge base was. I thought it was a much easier experience searching for my training materials in Dropbox.

Simply the best customer support system

The product is very well designed, easy and natural to use. On top of that, their support is excellent and they reply very quickly.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

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.