Help Scout vs. Helpshift

Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.

Incentivized

If you need a good way for players to send in support tickets that propagates in real-time, Helpshift would be a service I'd recommend.

Incentivized

• 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).
• The email newsletter.
• 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 trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need
• Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way.

Incentivized

• FAQ
• triggers by Google extensions
• customer service
• chat priority

• It is a bit slow sometimes, but not very often.
• I've noticed more network errors with their server in the past year.
• Small annoyance - they use a lot of lightbox popups and if you click outside the box all of your work is lost.

Incentivized

• The look could do with a bit of an upgrade. It's not a very big deal and isn't hard on the eyes but could probably be a bit more vibrant (or allow for customization).
• Better mobile support would be great. At the moment, it's very hard to try and do tickets from a phone.

Incentivized

We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.

Incentivized

Help Scout is a great solution for support teams. There are many articles and webinars to help you learn how to use Help Scout. There are also many features to help make your workflows easier and more efficient. I would readily recommend Help Scout to any small or medium-growing support teams.

Incentivized

Helpshift is really easy to use and set up. We enjoy the automation to automatically route certain issues to different smart folders. There's just a lot of flexibility in the functionality to make things work for our team in the best way. I didn't give it a 10/10 just because we need SMS/Apple Business Chat and Helpshift doesn't yet offer that. They also don't currently support social media channels but they are working on releasing that soon.

Incentivized

The few times we've had to contact them, they were courteous and gave us the information we needed swiftly.

Incentivized

This is tricky because there's helpdesk apps and chat apps (now Help Scout offers both). We first used just an email inbox (of course not scalable but we were very small), then we turned to Freshdesk, which was painful to use. It had some cool features but in general it was ugly, slow, using the interface was very non-intuitive and the prioritization was hard. I have to say this was more than a year ago, so probably they have changed, but anyway. Zendesk is very expensive considering the features are almost the same AND the chat app needs to be paid separately. As chat we used Tawk.to, it was functional but metrics were not that good and it was buggy at times. Comparing Help Scout with their competitors, at least for us, made it a no-brainer to hire them. The price was very attractive considering the amount of features, the great support and the quality of the app. I don't regret my decision at all because Help Scout, unlike other helpdesk companies, tries to have their app "smart" and not a big, corporate thing piled with features. It does what it needs, it's easy to use and helps you achieve your goals regarding support for your customers.

Incentivized

Helpshift is reasonably priced and has great analytics and capabilities and is very user-friendly. We had a hard time with Intercom about 2 years ago when we tried to implement them because their analytics were very minimal and wouldn't track what we needed it to. We haven't gone with Zendesk because we've heard from multiple people that their customer support was sub-standard

Incentivized

• We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents.

Incentivized

• The ability to properly organize and delegate work to customer service representatives has been a very positive ROI after using Helpshift.
• The customer service reps are much happier with this system over the previous system of a general company email address and other CS software tools.

Incentivized