Help Scout

Avantages

- 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

Inconvénients

- 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

Avantages

It was easy to get going and was the first app we used for customer service. It had integration with multiple other apps such as Mailchimp. Supports multiple users.

Inconvénients

It was ticket-oriented, got us into working more with tickets than customers pretty quickly, not because HelpScout but because using tickets and emails for support.

There was no integration with our website, so this was a bummer.

Avantages

It's reliable, and has most of the functions we need.

Inconvénients

It feels like the ticketing system has now been abandoned as far as new development is concerned. There have been some minor improvements listed for their beacon /messaging widget but little of consequence. As far as I can only the email address passed to their widget is hashed, custom variables are not so bad actors can pass fake or malicious data to support agents. No UK or EU servers.

Avantages

It has user friendly interface, multi-channel support and can integrate with other tools like slack .

Inconvénients

It has very limited features.pricing is a bit Higher and has limited language support.

Avantages

HelpScout is really simple to use & has a really clean interface and their customer service is A+++. I am someone who will stay with the company even if they don't have all the bells and whistles if they have excellent customer service, especially something like an email provider because it's hard to find really great customer service in email. I have been using it for over 10 years, & it also is like a database of all of my customer interactions. So I can type in the customers name at the top of the screen and it will pull up every email that they've ever sent in and every email that we've ever sent to them so it becomes this really powerful documentation tool.

Inconvénients

It doesn't have a ticketing system. So it's not so it sometimes it can be easy to miss emails or to have customer service emails go unanswered if a lot of emails come in at once. And a ticketing system and a lot of other email platforms it will bump it up to the top for you if you haven't answered it in a set amount of days but help scout doesn't have a easy way to do that. Even though it does have a knowledge base it's just not as strong in terms of customer service portal as some of the other tools I've explored like fresh desk.