Help ScoutReviews of helpscout.com

We have used this service for a year and unfortunately we are not satisfied. We have lost so many emails, so many of our customers have been annoyed just because of Help Scout's incompetence.

We've been using Helpscout for several years. It's fine for basic support and constructing Help pages. But it's not cheap if you need to support multiple clients and it relies quite a bit on you doing your own coding to present attractive looking documentation. However, the biggest issue by far is the inability to export data without going to great expense and effort, effectively locking you into their platform. For that reason alone, we cannot recommend it and now regret using it.

There is a lot that is great about Helpscout. Their UI, the docs, the ticket system, the Beacon used to provide help to users with an on-page help widget. It's a great product. Their customer service for when something technical actually goes wrong is horrendous. If they have technical issue and you report it, you'll spend at least a week trying to get a resolution because each person that looks at your latest response in the ticket doesn't review the full content of the previous ticket responses, so they start from "zero" each time. Their responses to your messages are blatant attempts to get a response out and move on with their day. Nobody actually knows how to solve the problems and no engineers that actually know what's going on seem to get involved when a tech problem is reported. I used to love this platform. But they've beaten me down with their apathy and inability to take me seriously. When nothing is going wrong it's a very reliable platform and 1 that until now I'd have recommended. I can't any longer.

Company has no decent way to export data, other than to write your own script and invoke their API's through the script for every conversation you ever had, and for every note you added to that conversation. And when you do, you have to worry about their API being rate limited. In order to use their API you have to be a coder. I am not sure if this is legal, considering the GDPR legislation. A bulk export through their user interface is what they should offer. Right now its a lock-in into using their services/system.

Good software but experience undermined by constant woke messages when you clear your emails. Just stick to providing great customer support software!

HS has improved so much our productivity when it comes to manage support on our services. I'd highly recommend this tool!

Unfortunately, since my previous review below, they started the "enshitification" process. They changed prices several times, cost-gated key features, removed loyalty discounts, and are trying to squeeze as much as they can from members. Now in the process of moving away. Original review below: I have tried a few support tools in over 10 years of supporting software and SaaS, and this is hands down the best. We were previously with Intercom who increased our prices massively after we finished integrating everything. Really shady stuff... Helpscout has been great, adding new features usually without extra charges, or for a small extra fee. The core product is fantastic. Simple, clean, efficient. The mobile app works great, live chat works perfectly, the knowledgebase is not just an afterthought and the reports are top-notch. Well done guys and thank you for an awesome product!

The design behind the ticket system is really good, assigning to people, adding notes, creating automatic workflows, etc., so it could be something everyone would love to use. But it is not, and here is why: - It becomes really slow very often. There isn't a week where I can just really focus on my work, as I have to wait sometimes 20-30 minutes for one email or attachment to load in. - Their developers do not support, nor care about actual problems in their code. When you contact their support, these people are not the developers of helpscout, maybe they have some basic knowledge about website development, but not that much. They can only tell you basic debugging ideas, what you have already gone through. Once you finally get to a stage where they realize that there is an actual problem in their code, they are putting it into their to do list, where it might never will be solved. There were issues, where I was contacted years after reporting it, that "yay we solved it". I sent them a recording about a 100kb attachment how slowly gets downloaded from their servers (about 30 minutes, if it gets downloaded at all), so if you are a web developer, you already know that zero codes are involved in this process, it is just pure server speed. And they just couldn't do anything about it, but this speed doesn't only affects attachments, but their entire system. So instead of a smooth experience it is often a struggle to work with them.