| 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> | 4 <p>Missive’s positioning as a more generalised tool for customer facing teams means that its overall feature set as a dedicated customer support tool is relatively lacking. To be more specific, Missive is best suited to smaller teams with low ticket volume who manage customer interactions across a range of social and email channels. That being said, its omni-channel support is well rounded, with only a native Slack integration being a possible major drawback of teams. Additionally, its rule based ticket routing and analytics filtering features are deep and offer room for a lot of customisability. </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> | 7 <p>We find Missive’s self-serve onboarding to be simple and intuitive. It would take an average SMB employee less than a day to become proficient in using the platform. Additionally, its web app is fast to load and easy to navigate for new agents.</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> | 8 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We find Missive's interface to be modern, sleek, and fast to load. Both its light and dark themes are well designed and easy to navigate with clear accent colours applied to core features and buttons. </span></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> | 4 <p>At present, Missive lacks many customer facing features that you might expect from a customer support tool, such as a help centre. Additionally, it's live chat widget only allows for limited customisability focused on themes and colours.</p><p>That being said, there are some areas where customisability is a core strength for Missive. For example, the ability to centrally manage email signatures for all agents with the ability to add interactive surveys into them - or the ability to create rich, rules based workflows to route tickets.</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> | 8 <p>Missive offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be very simple, taking less than 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels is also a simple process - for example connecting your email can be done with just a couple clicks instead of needing to set up email forwarding manually. </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> | 5 <p>Missive offers a dedicated customer support email which we find helpful and responsive (reply times were typically >24 hours). Additionally, its 'help' documentation is rich and answers most common issues and queries. However, we would have liked to see the addition of a live chat widget for support on more urgent queries.</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> | 5 <p>Missive provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot) automation platforms like Zapier. Additionally, it offers an API through which users can interact with data directly. </p><p>That being said, we found it missing some key integrations natively that we would like to have seen, such as a native Slack integration and integration with common project management systems (such as Jira and Asana). </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> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Users can export key data across a range of categories including past conversations, customer profiles etc. through self-serve.</span></p> |
