A decade ago, Help Scout had ushered a revolution by transforming customer service into an effective marketing tool. With its help, businesses were able to foster long-term, meaningful relationships with their consumers.
Help Scout changed the culture and made companies more considerate towards their customers by delivering excellent customer service. If you want to know more about this customer service software, then continue reading our blog on Help Scout review.
Table of Content
Basics of Help Scout
Help Scout is a popular cloud-based help desk software that is used by businesses both small and large for better managing their customer relationships. As a cloud-based help desk software, a lot of its features and functions are typical of a help desk service, but with the additional support of offering a more personalized and great customer experience.
Customers aren’t supposed to be a number on a bulky ticket portal. They need to be looked at as opportunities to enhance your relationship with the public. Pushing them around is not going to be of help. Help Scout provides that playfield that allows collaboration for support whenever a customer requires it.
At the same time, Help Scout tries to eliminate any complexities that helpdesk software often brings along with them. The major aim of Help Scout is to be able to manage customer relationships more effectively while being able to raise the standards for user experience and offer better satisfaction to the customers when they interact with the organizations.
Isn’t it the best help desk software in the market? Well, let’s check what this software is best for.
What is Help Scout Best Known For?
Used for Discovering Resources:
For organizations that are founded on the basis of knowledge sharing and learning, the success of the students becomes the first priority. In such a case, having a help desk that can provide major insights into students’ conversations is important.
Even though Help Scout has centralized access to any frequently asked questions through the knowledge base, it becomes difficult to access that information.
The platform is quite difficult to navigate for the customer service agents themselves. There are resources for data science and data analytics but they are of no use if you can’t access them easily.
Easy Onboarding:
In order to grow, and automate things while growing, organizations need to scale up their efforts. They need to make their customer service systems more powerful. The systems should be such that they help the teams in making things easier for their clients and not make things difficult for themselves.
The limited customization options and a limited number of integrations don’t do much for the companies after the onboarding.
The customer service system is quite good, but to make it really powerful, it is important that you offer enough options for customization options along with app integrations that can be useful for your customers and better customer experience.
Customer Retention:
Over the years, the Help Desk has managed to merge with CRM solutions of many companies. Companies were provided with solutions that helped in maintaining the high standard of responsiveness required to maintain good customer relations.
With a focused offering, Help Scout easily manages to attract customers and clients. But after a certain point, it becomes difficult to retain these customers and clients.
A focused offering can only manage to solve a limited number of things. In order to retain customers after attracting them, you have to be open to opportunities and offer something for which customers will definitely come back to you.
In addition to this, the pricing is such that for once a customer will give it a shot, but after realizing the lack of options along with the expensive plan, these customers wouldn’t want to stay for long.
Product Details Of Help Scout
Help Scout is a really good help desk software that is ideal for organizations of all sizes and can easily support companies with larger teams or clusters to manage. It is good to use Help Scout for clutter-free features that can easily manage teams of any size.
In addition to an integrated knowledge management, robust API, and several app integrations, Help Scout has a free iPhone app for being able to support its users. The comfort and convenience offered by the tool allow you to focus on your patron and their immediate business needs.
Help Scout was founded in 2011 and the company headquarters are based in the United States. It has been a trusted source for keeping patrons happy for more than 10,000 companies in over 130 countries.
Companies like Pocket, MixMax, Reddit, Litmus, and Basecamp have been using Help Scout for quite some time now and it has helped them in offering their patrons a delightful experience.
Help Scout Features
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Shared Inbox:
You can now make use of separate mailboxes for organizing all your customer conversations beyond different teams and email addresses. With features like Private Notes, Saved Replies, Collision Detection, and Tagging, all the team members share the information easily and make sure that everybody is on the same page.
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Knowledge Base:
Almost everyone has the freedom to help create content for customers on the Docs editor. You can customize any categories, articles, or related SEO details in one place, but there are some limitations to it.
The Docs article needs to be embedded on any web page to feel more like a part of your website. There is also an auto-generated sitemap for your knowledge base and SEO options for every article which should be a little easier to configure compared to the current one.
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In-app Messaging:
With the help of a Beacon, you can send a message from any website, blog, app, or store. This can allow you to reduce support requests.
With an additional line of JavaScript, you can create your own logic and trigger messages. In addition to this, there will be Ratings, Reporting feature, and Mobile SDK Support coming to the in-app messaging feature.
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Customer Management:
Help Scout makes all the previous conversations and activities from other apps available for reference at any time you are solving a customer support query. Each of your customers you have talked through Beacon will have a profile on Help Scout.
You can integrate or build your own custom app and integrate your customer database to Help Scout. It doesn’t allow your employees to have people feel like numbers.
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Reporting:
Reports help you in evaluating your team’s volume channel through all the communication channels like conversations, Chats, Docs, Customer Happiness Reports, Email, Phone, and Company. You can also sort out your data with advanced filters.
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Live Chat:
With the Live Chat option, you can get rid of overwhelming chat volume and frustrated customers who are left to wait. All the help content is presented to the customers easily through Beacon.
Beacon also makes sure that the live chat window is not shown to any customer unless someone is actually present to chat with them. Beacon also offers customization options like Self Service, Neutral, and Ask First, which allows you to guide the customers through the initial screening process. In short, the Live Chat option will improve your customer support service.
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Integrations:
There are several apps be it an Analytics, Communication, CRM, Marketing, or eCommerce app, each can be integrated with Help Scout for content management. You can integrate almost any tool that you love and use for your business operations or customer support in addition to Help Scout and make the process easier for your employees.
Pros of Help Scout
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Customer-Centric:
The entire working and philosophy of Help Scout are designed around customer service. They do not see customers as ticket numbers that will be solved with saved replies. This mirrors the approach of many companies. When a platform like this comes to the rescue of the companies, great customer service is delivered at each level.
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Ease of use & Set up:
Almost all the team members love how easy it is to set up Help Scout. It was also easy to use on a daily basis, which simplified a lot of things for the users. When a tool is so easy to set up and use, you are not required to provide extensive training.
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Support Tickets and Chats:
Help Scout looks at support tickets as conversations and opportunities to improve things. Customers are not seen as case numbers, but actual opportunities for change having this outlook changes the way you do things. They also have the Beacon that can help the customers depending on which page they are on.
With Beacon, Help Scout is not only providing Live Chat to solve support tickets, it goes a few steps further by bringing together real-time chat and knowledge platforms.
With the Beacon, Help Scout is not only providing Live Chat, it goes a few steps further by bringing together real-time chat and knowledge base.
Cons of Help Scout
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Lack of integrations:
Even though they have several app integrations available at this point, there are some important ones like Salesforce. Not all companies have the same integration requirements or use the same apps.
In order to satisfy that demand, Help Scout needs to be more open to popular integrations that are usually in demand among customer-centric companies.
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Limited customization options:
Even though it is simple and easy to use, it requires more customization options for different teams and users. Even the layout and styling for the knowledge platform require improvement according to some users.
Even though it is simple and easy to use, it requires more customization options for different teams and users. Even the layout and styling for the knowledge platform require improvement according to some users.
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Overpriced messaging feature:
A company might also feel that the messaging feature that Help Scout offers is a bit overpriced in terms of its uses and when compared to other options that are either available at a cheaper rate or free of cost.
When a messaging feature in a customer satisfaction platform is found to be expensive, it will not be accepted by a lot of teams and companies that try to provide maximum customer satisfaction by incurring fewer costs.
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The Docs section:
The Docs feature is an important part of the overall Help Scout experience for better ease of use and offering a better help desk solution to your clients and vendors.
Even after several updates and developments over the past few years, users have felt that it might still lack certain features. The Docs feature was also found to be outdated at times by team members.
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Focused Offering:
As mentioned earlier, Help Scout works with a tunnel vision of only satisfying customers, in which the platform often overlooks other important needs.
Having a simple to use and understand tool will mostly work in favor of the company, but a focused offering will always have its own disadvantages, in which case, Help Scout needs to be slightly more open in its offerings.
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A bit pricey:
For every organization, maintaining a budget is important, be it for marketing or the customer support team. A team working for the customer support always gets a limited amount of budget allotted to it.
So having Help Scout, which proves to be a bit pricey, considering the focused and limited features it has to offer, organizations will be quick to jump on to options that offer more at the same or lesser price.
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Pricing Overview
| Standard – $20 per user/mo | Plus – $35 per user/mo | Company – For teams that are 25+ in size |
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Is There a Better Alternative to The Help Scout?
After taking a look at the cost and the limited or focused features offered by Help Scout, you must be wondering if there are any alternatives to it. There are several other software that are focused on customer satisfaction and help companies in managing their knowledge source by keeping their employees and clients in mind. CloudTutorial is one such easy-to-use alternative that has gained much popularity in the market.
CloudTutorial is a knowledge management software that helps customers find what they are looking for without having to wait on long calls with the support team. It also allows you to customize your help center depending on your industry. Here are some unique points of CloudTutorial platform:
- With the AI-powered FAQ section, your teams tend to spend less time answering repetitive questions and focus on other important tasks. With the real-time data managing platform knowledge bases, the FAQs can be easily updated, categories and subcategories can be created, and keeping the workflows up to date.
- What makes CloudTutorial a perfect solution is that it can cover almost any company size and any kind of team can benefit from this software.
- Even companies with 11-50 employees or medium-sized organizations can also find that CloudTutorial is able to offer them value for money by being one of the best Help Scout alternatives. This will be evident in the team performance that you get to see for better user interface.
Conclusion
There are many customer service apps or ticketing system software available out there, but the one that works well for your company is the best. In this review, we have tried to cover all the features and uses of the Help Scout ticketing system, along with talking about the pain points that need to be addressed.
The review is based on actual Help Scout reviews by clients of the software. Help Scout clients range from health wellness and fitness companies to vet companies and even individual pet owners.
A bigger company size might benefit from Help Scout, whereas CloudTutorial can cater to all kinds of organizations. Considered as one of the best Help Scout alternatives, CloudTutorial can be helpful software to boost customer service of your business.
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