| Functionality | 7 <p>Help Scout is a lightweight tool that offers some support functionality that most SMBs will need. Help Scout allows you to offer support via live chat, email, social channels, and create your own Help Centre. It also has some basic automation, reporting and AI functionality.</p><p>However, it lacks support for phone, SMS and WhatsApp and a no-code chatbot builder to automate chat-related workflow.</p> | 6 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">HelpCrunch is more of a customer engagement platform than a focused support tool. It places emphasis on features like proactive messaging via its chat widget and sending email outbound blasts to engage customers. When it comes to its core support functionality like live chat and building help centres, HelpCrunch is nothing special. We were sad to see a lack of any kind of AI chatbot and a limited array of integrations though.</span></p> |
| Ease of Use | 8 <p>Help Scout is easy to pick up, even for beginners. Its inbox feels just like an email inbox—clean, simple, and intuitive. In fact, it’s one of the most user-friendly interfaces we’ve seen.</p><p>That said, there are some pain points: Unlike most customer support tools, Help Scout doesn’t have a sidebar for quickly navigating to other tickets. Setting up custom views isn’t straightforward. Instead of filtering an existing view, you have to build a new workflow, which feels unnecessarily complicated.</p> | 5 <p>Whilst we found HelpCrunch's interface to feel somewhat dated, overall, the product is fairly simple to use. Its inbox experience is familiar and intuitive, similar to the feel of an email inbox. On average, it would take an SMB employee a few hours to master its use.</p> |
| Look and feel | 9 <p>Help Scout’s interface is clean, colorful, and easy on the eyes. It’s fast, responsive, and pleasant to use.</p> | 4 <p>HelpCrunch's design aesthetic feels dated. It lacks the simpler, more modern look that many of its competitors have today - both on the internal facing web app and external facing widgets/knowledge bases. When tested, we also noticed a slight lag to certain pages in terms of load times, often taking a few seconds.</p> |
| Customisability | 3 <p>Customization is where Help Scout falls short. Without code, you can only make very basic adjustments to the live chat widget and help center. Automation workflows are limited, and creating custom reports from scratch isn’t possible. If you need heavy customization, you’ll likely find Help Scout restrictive.</p> | 7 <p>HelpCrunch offers a number of channels to customize your experience with the product. On the internal facing pieces of the product we especially appreciated the ability to customise how customer cards look in the inbox, as well as the ease to which you can create custom inbox views. However, the options for customizing the look and feel of widgets/knowledge bases were somewhat more limited.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 6 <p>Help Scout offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be slightly longer than necessary, taking around 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels may take some time though - with no easy one-click email connect option, you’ll have to setup email forwarding manually. When it comes to richer customisation options - the platform is fairly limited when compared to peers meaning it won't take long to get the most out of it.</p> | 4 <p>HelpCrunch offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be slightly longer than necessary, taking around 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels may take some time though - with no easy one-click email connect option, you’ll have to setup email forwarding manually. When it comes to richer customisation options - the platform is fairly standard when compared to competitors with simple scripts to add live widgets to your website and relatively basic appearance customisation options. </p> |
| Customer Support | 8 <p>You can email Help Scout’s support team directly from the app during U.S. business hours. Their responses are generally quick (within a few hours), and Help Scout's agents always go above and beyond. The AI chatbot however, is weak point, offering unhelpful and generic responses.</p> | 8 <p>HelpCentre offers support primarily via a live chat widget inside its web app. When tested, we find it easy to get hold of a live agent - in generally less than 5 minutes. Once contacted, we found them to be knowledgeable and helpful, often able to answer complex queries in a single response.</p> |
| Integratability | 8 <p>Help Scout offers pre-built integrations with over 100 apps, including commonly needed integrations such as CRMs, calling systems, project management tools, and email marketing platforms. It also has an API for custom integrations.</p> | 2 <p>We were disappointed by HelpCrunch's limited array of integrations. Core integrations such as with CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), e-commerce platforms (Shopify) or ticketing platforms (Jira) are all marked as 'coming soon' but remain omitted entirely for the time being.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 3 <p>Help Scout's data export capabilities are somewhat limited. While reporting data for selected reports can be exported directly from within Help Scout, most data can only be exported via API.</p> | 6 <p>HelpCrunch offers self-serve export functionality for contact lists and transcripts within its web app. We were also pleased to note that they an offer an API which users can interact with too.</p> |
