Help Scout Review – Shared inbox, Help Center and Live Chat Software

In this Help Scout review, you'll find more information about its features, pricing, pros and cons and why you should consider using it.
9.4/10 (Expert Score)
Product is rated as #2 in category Knowledge Base
9.4Expert Score
A better way to talk with your customers

Help Scout is a specialized customer support platform designed for expanding teams to provide industry-leading customer service. When you join up, you have access to a comprehensive set of customer support-optimized tools.

Customer support
9.4
Value for money
9.6
Ease of use
9.2
Features
9.3
Pros
  • Extremely affordable price
  • Integration with e-commerce and marketing tools
  • Agents and support staff can learn through training very quickly
Cons
  • No telephone assistance
  • Provide consumers tags

With Help Scout, you can be accessed wherever your clients need assistance while also providing your staff with the tools for speedier teamwork, organization, and automation. Help Scout enables you to keep things simple, move quickly, and concentrate on pleasing customers in contrast to corporate help desks that are challenging to set up and require dedicated admins to run.

Deliver self-service, live chat, and email assistance from a single, robust platform that mimics your mailbox. With features like stored replies and automated processes, you can easily respond to 52% more emails, and a knowledge base that is designed for discovery can cut down on your support volume by 30%. Everyone benefits since there will be fewer support inquiries and happier consumers.

Read further to learn more about Help Scout, in our review we will detail its features, pros and cons with our rating, and a conclusion about why you should use it.

Click on “open” if you want to see exactly what we will talk about in the rest of this article.

Quick Overview

What is Help Scout?

Help Scout is an efficient help desk software. According to the vendor’s value proposition, their software saves time on user training since Help Scout is easy to use, set up, and grow like any business product. 

To enable collaboration between teams and the management of numerous products or brands from a single account, this solution provides several mailboxes that can accommodate as many email addresses as are required. Reports on team performance, customer satisfaction, and discussion trends are also provided. 

The Docs Knowledge Base offers up to five fully editable knowledge base websites that can be integrated with a company’s help desk, work flawlessly on any device, and enable users to assist themselves.

Help Scout specifications

FeaturesIntegrations / Live chat / Real-time messaging
Best suited forSmall businesses, Mid size businesses, Large enterprises
Website languagesEnglish
Website URLVisit official website
Support linkSupport page
Live chatYes
Company addressBoston
Year founded2011

Pricing

Help Scout pricing: How much does Help Scout cost?

There are two pricing for Help Scout: Monthly and Annually.

Monthly plan:

  • Standard $25 per user per month
  • Plus $50 per user per month
  • Pro – Contact them in a link

Annual plan:

  • Standard $20 per user per month
  • Plus $40 per user per month
  • Pro $65 per user per month
Pricing rangeFrom $20/month to $65/month
Pricing typesAnnual subscription / Monthly subscription
Free planNo
Free trialYes, 15 days
Money back guaranteeYes, 30 days
Pricing page linkSee plans

Help Scout pricing plans

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Monthly Plans:

Standard: $25 per user per month 

  • 2 Mailboxes
  • 1 Doc site
  • Up to 25 users
  • Live chat
  • In-app messaging(See Pricing)
  • Beacon help widget
  • Custom reports
  • Automated workflows
  • Customer properties
  • API and 50+ integrations

Plus: $50 per user per month

  • 5 Mailboxes
  • 2 Docs sites
  • No maximum user count
  • 25 light users
  • Custom fields
  • Teams
  • Advanced permissions
  • Unlimited reporting history
  • Advanced API access
  • Salesforce, Jira, HubSpot apps
  • HIPAA compliance
  • Enterprise security

Pro Plan: 

Available only for annual payments.

Annual Plans: 

Standard: $20 per user per month

  • 2 Mailboxes 
  • 1 Doc site
  • Up to 25 users
  • Live chat
  • In-app messaging(See Pricing)
  • Beacon help widget
  • Custom reports​​
  • Automated workflows set up rules to filter emails and automate actions
  • Customer properties​​Enrich customer profiles with custom attributes
  • API and 50+ integrations

Plus: $40 per user per month

  • 5 Mailboxes 
  • 2 Docs sites
  • No maximum user count
  • 25 light users 
  • TeamsAssign 
  • Advanced API (access​​400 API calls per minute and access reporting endpoints)
  • HIPAA compliance
  • Enterprise security 

Pro: $65 per user per month

  • 25 Mailboxes 
  • 10 Docs sites 
  • 50 light 
  • Enterprise security
  • HIPAA compliance
  • API rate limit increase
  • Concierge onboarding service
  • Dedicated account manager  

Features

Help Scout features: What can you do with it?

Help Scout agents can concentrate on enhancing the client experience thanks to Scout’s main features, including a help desk interface with shared discussion inboxes and its knowledge library. With its analytics and reporting features, managers can keep tabs on the success of both teams and individual agents.

Shared Inbox

An effective substitute for a distribution list, group Gmail account, or Outlook mailbox is Scout’s shared inbox. It makes it simple for your staff to collaborate and provides top-notch email support.

  • To manage all client communications across many teams, email addresses, and brands, use distinct mailboxes.
  • Use private notes, collision detection, prepared responses (also known as canned responses), stored replies, and tags to collaborate with colleagues.
  • Offer templates that resemble a typical email.
  • Access the complete profile of a client, which includes fast linkages to various internal systems and account histories.
  • Organize interactions over the phone, through chat, and via email in one inbox.
  • In order to improve security, set up two-factor authentication.

Customer Service CRM

Help Scout may be used to organize and save customer information. These CRM features are listed:

  • Locate, group, and control consumer profiles.
  • Auto-update client information
  • Build your own app or connect with more than 50 connectors.

It’s important to remember that HelpScout shouldn’t be used as a substitute for Salesforce or Zendesk when it comes to CRM. It’s because Help Scout focuses more on email management using a shared inbox.

Live Chat

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You may add the Beacon embeddable widget from Help Scout to the website. Beacon allows you to:

  • Provide clients with content recommendations based on the page they’re on.
  • Assigning a communication to others might help you control escalation.
  • Self-service, neutral, or ask first to tailor the client experience is the available three options.
  • Make it smarter by using the JavaScript API for Beacon.
  • Keep in mind that using live chat in Help Scout requires the installation of a third-party program.

Reporting

Reporting feature

Even the greatest customer service software’s effectiveness must be evaluated based on the performance statistics it generates. The examination of Help Scout reports offers the practical insights customer service managers need.

  • Chats
  • Knowledge base documents
  • Emails
  • Making calls
  • Consumer contentment

Additional report choices Determine the categories, processes, and types of stored answers you use the most frequently.

Help Desk Reporting

You have access to six distinct sorts of reports from Help Scout: email, chat, phone, company, happiness, and documents.

  • Filter information based on the customer fields, discussion type, tag, folder, or mailbox.
  • While evaluating a report, you may always add or edit views.
  • Verify important metrics, such as those for responsiveness and resolution.
  • Real-time updates to reports.
  • Give another Help Scout team member the report link.
  • Create CSV or XLSX files from reports.

Knowledge Base

Knowledge base feature

The information base on Help Scout also aids in enhancing client happiness and service. Knowledge base articles provide agents consistent information to give clients, and since consumers may seek assistance on their own, according to Help Scout, the number of talks between agents and customers is reduced by 20%.

Any assistance agent or manager may build knowledge base articles with adjustable categories, related content, and search engine optimization (SEO) keywords using Help Scout’s straightforward post editor.

Conclusion

Help Scout review: Why you should use it?

Help Scout’s characteristics that enable effective client contact, a non-steep learning curve, collaborative capabilities, and the ability to construct and host knowledge bases are its primary advantages. Details are provided below: 

Streamlined Client Communications 

Help Scout makes it simple and quick for businesses to communicate with their customers, enabling them to offer dependable and competent assistance across a variety of channels. Customers won’t have to endure tedious procedures or wait in line for hours to speak with an agent thanks to this.

Consumers may easily receive reliable, human customer service using Help Scout, which might result in a highly positive experience that leads them to suggest the users’ items to other potential customers.

Simple to Learn

Although there is a little learning curve with Help Scout for users, it is not very high. Users may still rapidly become accustomed to Help Scout’s features and functionality in less than an hour. After that, they may anticipate the system operating at its peak efficiency.

Hub for Collaboration

Help Scout is a useful platform for agents to collaborate and share ideas on client requests. Before responding to inquiries, they might utilize the Internal Note.

Knowledge Bases Are Created And Hosted

Help Rich knowledge bases that users may use for data import can be created and hosted by Scout. The system’s support for integration with more than 20 other applications and systems makes this possible. Future third-party app compatibility is anticipated to increase.

Alternatives

Help Scout Alternatives

Before subscribing to Help Scout, it’s always a good idea to check out the competition and find the best knowledge base software for your needs. You can find the Help Scout alternatives here.

Here are some versus to compare Help Scout with its competitors:

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Help Scout Review – Shared inbox, Help Center and Live Chat Software
Help Scout Review – Shared inbox, Help Center and Live Chat Software

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