You may be good at acquiring customers, but keeping them is another story. You should make it easy for them to raise their concerns, which you can then address fast. To do all that, you need the right tools, one of which is Help Scout.
Help Scout stands out as a powerful customer service tool that aims to enhance your communication with customers while maintaining a friendly, human touch.
It’s meant to help you streamline your support processes, manage inquiries effectively, and build stronger relationships with your clients. But with so many options in the market, is Help Scout the right choice for you?
In this Help Scout review, I’ll help you explore its key features, benefits, and potential drawbacks to help you determine if it’s the right fit for your business needs.
Disclaimer: If you buy any products through links on this site, I may earn a commission. But it doesn't make any difference to your cost, and it helps me keep this blog running. So you could always read my articles for free.
What is Help Scout?
Help Scout is a help desk software meant to streamline customer communication for small businesses, startups, and growing teams.
Unlike traditional ticketing systems, it prioritizes conversations over case numbers, giving every interaction a more human touch.
With Help Scout, you can manage all customer emails, live chats, and self-service articles from one platform.
Its shared inbox lets multiple team members handle inquiries without stepping on each other’s toes, while collision detection ensures no two people respond to the same message.
You can also tag conversations, automate workflows, and use saved replies to save time on repetitive questions.
Beyond email and chat, Help Scout offers a knowledge base feature, empowering your customers to find answers on their own.
Other than that, it integrates smoothly with common tools like Slack, Shopify, and Zapier, so you can connect it with your existing workflow.
With this foundation in place, let’s move on to the next section of this Help Scout review.
Help Scout key features
Whether you’re scaling a support team or just starting out, Help Scout gives you the tools to deliver exceptional service while keeping things organized. Let’s discover its key features in detail.
Knowledge portal
Managing customer inquiries can quickly become overwhelming, especially when your team is repeatedly asked the same questions. That’s where Help Scout’s knowledge portal feature steps in.
A knowledge portal, also known as a self-service knowledge base, allows you to create a central hub where customers can quickly find answers without waiting for support.
With this feature, you can organize articles into categories, add search functionality, and even customize the portal to align with your branding.
This makes it easy for your customers to locate FAQs, how-to guides, troubleshooting steps, or product documentation.
Besides that, Help Scout’s portal integrates with Beacon—its chat widget—allowing customers to search articles from within the chat window before escalating to live support.
Tracking what’s working is easy with built-in analytics that show which articles are popular or need improvement.
Help desk
Now the second feature I’ll cover in this Help Scout review is the help desk. Keeping customer conversations organized can be challenging, especially when they come from multiple channels. That’s where Help Scout’s help desk feature makes a difference.
It offers a shared inbox that lets you and your team manage emails, live chats, and customer inquiries from one place, ensuring no message slips through the cracks.
The help desk feature in Help Scout goes beyond basic email management. With collision detection, you avoid duplicate responses by seeing who’s working on what in real time.
You can also tag conversations, assign them to specific team members, and use private notes to collaborate internally.
Aside from that, workflows let you automate repetitive tasks like assigning tickets based on keywords or tagging messages for follow-up, saving valuable time.
You can also create saved replies for common questions to respond faster while still sounding friendly and human.
Plus, with integrated customer profiles, you always have the context you need to offer personalized support.
Analytics and reporting tools within the help desk help you monitor performance, ensuring your team meets response-time goals and identifies areas for improvement.
Customer history
Delivering great customer service requires more than just quick responses. You need to understand the context behind each interaction. That’s where Help Scout’s customer history feature comes into play. I’ll go over it now in this review of Help Scout.
It gives you a complete timeline of every conversation a customer has had with your team, across all channels, so you can respond with insight and continuity.
If one team member handled an issue previously, others can pick it up seamlessly without losing momentum or rehashing old questions.
This feature also integrates customer data with other tools, such as Shopify or HubSpot, so you have order history, CRM notes, and relevant information in one place.
You can even add internal notes during conversations, giving your team extra context without the customer seeing them.
Performance reporting
Another feature I want to talk about in this review of Help Scout is performance reporting. With analytics reports, you can track essential metrics like first response time, resolution time, and conversation volume.
This way, you’ll know how long customers wait for a reply and how efficiently issues are resolved.
The reports also allow you to filter data by team members, channels, and tags. That means you can easily spot trends and patterns in your support activity.
You can monitor customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores to see how customers feel about your service and pinpoint areas where improvements are needed.
Additionally, trend analysis lets you forecast busy periods, so you can plan ahead and ensure your team is prepared.
Beacon
One of the key features worth mentioning in this Help Scout review is Beacon. It’s a customizable chat widget that gives your customers real-time help without making them leave your website or app.
Whether they need to search your knowledge base or connect with live chat, Beacon ensures they find the answers they need.
With Beacon, you can offer multiple support options. Customers can browse help articles, send messages, or start a chat—all from the same widget.
If your support team has a limited number of agents, or agents with limited availability, you can decide when chat is available. This gives you control over workload and response times.
If no one is available to chat, Beacon allows customers to leave a message, ensuring their requests never go unanswered.
One of Beacon’s strengths is how it balances automation with human support. For example, it can recommend relevant articles based on the page the visitor is viewing, helping customers solve problems independently.
Beacon also integrates with customer history, so when a conversation escalates to live chat, your team has the context needed to respond effectively.
3rd party integrations
The last feature I’ll dive into in this review of Help Scout is a collection of integrations. You can connect Help Scout with popular CRM systems like HubSpot and Salesforce, giving your team access to customer profiles and sales data directly within conversations.
Similarly, if you run an eCommerce store, integrations with Shopify or WooCommerce let you view order history alongside support requests, so you can resolve issues faster.
Help Scout also integrates with Slack, allowing your team to stay in the loop through instant notifications about new inquiries or updates.
And with automation tools like Zapier, you can create custom workflows—such as auto-assigning tickets or triggering tasks in project management tools like Trello.
These integrations ensure your team stays productive by keeping everything connected in one place.
Help Scout pros and cons
Help Scout stands out as a popular choice among businesses of all sizes, offering a blend of user-friendly features and robust functionality. However, like any tool, it has its advantages and disadvantages. So let’s take a look at them in this Help Scout review.
Help Scout pros
User-friendly interface: Help Scout’s intuitive design makes it easy for your team to figure out without a lot of training. They can start managing customer inquiries without a steep learning curve.
Shared inbox: Collaborate effectively with your team using a shared inbox that allows everyone to view and respond to customer messages in real time.
Customer history: Access detailed customer histories, giving you context for every interaction and enabling personalized support.
Integrations: Seamlessly connect with popular tools like Slack, HubSpot, and Shopify, creating a streamlined workflow that enhances productivity.
Analytics and reporting: Gain insights into your team’s performance with built-in analytics, helping you identify areas for improvement and measure customer satisfaction.
Helpscout cons
Incompatibility with some browser extensions: According to a number of users, some browser extensions cause Help Scout to crash. If that happens, you’ll need to remove and install the extensions again.
Limited customization: While Help Scout offers useful features, it may lack some advanced customization options that larger organizations require for their workflows.
No built-in phone support: If your business relies heavily on phone support, you’ll need to integrate with another service, as Help Scout does not provide built-in phone functionality.
Help Scout pricing plans
In the final section of this review of Help Scout, I’ll cover its pricing plans. All the Help Scout pricing plans let you add an unlimited number of users. The cost varies depending on the number of customers you want to help every month and the features you need.
Here’s the pricing for you to be able to help at least 100 contacts.
Free plan: Help Scout has a free plan that lets you help a maximum of 50 contacts per month. It includes a shared inbox, knowledge base, help widget with AI answers, in-app messaging, and basic Reporting. Note that you won’t get any API integrations with this plan.
Standard plan: At $50 per month, this plan is perfect for small teams just getting started with help desk software.
With this plan, you get all the features of the free plan, and additional features like multiple inboxes, multiple docs sites, API and 100+ integrations, advanced reports, surveys and NPS, CSAT ratings, and customer properties.
Plus Plan: For $75 per month, the Plus Plan is fit for growing businesses needing more advanced features. The extra features in this plan include Salesforce, Jira, HubSpot apps, Custom fields, advanced permissions, teams, advanced views and workflows, and restricted docs sites.
Over to you: Help Scout review
After evaluating Help Scout, it’s clear that it’s a solid platform with user-friendly interface and robust features.
Whether you’re a small or medium business, Help Scout can significantly improve your team’s productivity and customer satisfaction.
However, larger businesses seeking a more comprehensive solution with phone support and advanced customization needs may want to look elsewhere.
By making an informed decision based on this Help Scout review, you can elevate your customer service experience and foster lasting connections with your audience.
Did I miss anything? Did you try Help Scout? Do you have any questions or comments? Share your thoughts below in the comments section.
