HelpSpace vs. Help Scout

Are you struggling to keep up with customer requests from different channels? Or does the customer support team have no medium for collaboration? Whatever the problem may be, it will eventually end up hurting your customer support provisions, which is bad for business.

Therefore, what you need is a reliable customer support tool that keeps you on the top of your game. But which one should it be: HelpSpace or Help Scout? We compare both these platforms below to help you make the right pick.

What Is HelpSpace?

HelpSpace is an intuitive, beautiful designed, and straightforward customer service tool made with the aim of simplifying your customer support.

Since it shows all your important customer support messages in one place, it eradicates confusion and streamlines the process for the whole team, allowing them to respond to customer issues in a unified inbox.

Additionally, the tool also offers other features that make customer support easier, faster, and smoother.

What Can You Do With HelpSpace?

HelpSpace has many features to make customer service a breeze. Here’s a look at them:

Tickets

Possibly, the most impressive feature of HelpSpace is the ticketing with the shared inbox, where your customer support team can see customer queries coming from multiple channels. In this way, they can reply to all questions and concerns from a unified inbox.

Likewise, you can also allocate the queries or ‘tickets’ to several groups or members.

More importantly, your customer support team can use Quick Replies to shorten the response time. Instead of typing the same answers over and over again, they can simply direct the customers to the appropriate Document or Blog.

Tasks

Coordinate your internal tasks and those of your team with Tasks. It simplifies the overview of tasks and makes the workload for the next time transparent. With the popular Kanban Board, it offers one of the most popular views for your to-dos.

In addition, tasks can be created and linked directly in the tickets to work on them in parallel and efficiently, without forgetting anything.

Docs

HelpSpace's Docs is the knowledge base and self-service page for your customers and team. The tool offers three style options:

• Documentation: It appears like a document containing information on any subject.

• Help-Center: The Help-Center is where all the information is readily available, and the users can also search for particular documents, topics, or categories.

• Blog: You can also write blog posts to tell the customers about the inclusions in your new update or anything else.

Docs are fully customizable, which allows you to be unique. From changing the document’s color to your brand theme to using advanced CSS customizations, there’s a lot you can do to make Docs brand-centric.

Widgets

HelpSpace has visually appealing widgets that you can show on your website to attract customers, or visitors. You can also integrate it into your application to display the documentation for your users. For instance, you can put up widgets for Contact or Help-Center, depending on the placement that yields the best results.

Like Docs, Widgets are also fully customizable and can be made according to your brand theme.

Reports

HelpSpace also shows you a report of your customer service, indicating the waiting, opened, closed, and pending tickets. The report helps you visualize your performance and make the necessary improvements or changes.

What Is Help Scout?

Just like HelpSpace, Help Scout is another customer support platform that has particularly been designed for growing businesses. Today, the tool is being used in 140 countries by over 12,000 businesses.

Besides offering deep customer support functionality, the platform also had educational material for budding businesses, such as articles, live classes, and blog posts about improving customer experience and reaching your business goals.

Quite ironically, this is also one of the shortcomings of the platform since it adds complexity to usage, making it difficult for new businesses to benefit from Help Scout.

On the flip side, HelpSpace is the perfect alternative with its easy-to-learn interface and fun approach to customer service.

What Can You Do With Help Scout?

Here are the key features of Help Scout:

Tickets

Help Scout offers Mailboxes that are shared inboxes to deal with customers’ queries as a team. Whether you have three people on your customer support team or three hundred, Mailboxes ensure they are all on the same page.

Messages

The tool’s Messages feature allows you to onboard the customers and recommend helpful content. Plus, you can begin a conversation with them or announce your latest feature through Messages.

Live Chat

You can also offer Live Chat functionality to your customers, helping them in real-time as they browse through your website.

Knowledge Base

Help Scout’s Knowledge Base is anonymous to Docs on HelpSpace. It lets you write articles, add images, tables, and text to them, edit them, select categories, and then optimize them for the web.

Reports

Reports allow you to evaluate your customer support staff’s performance on different metrics and make improvements where required.

How Is HelpSpace Better?

HelpSpace trumps Help Scout in terms of pricing, being almost two times cheaper than its competitor. Moreover, it costs less to add another docs site, user, or mailbox in HelpSpace than Help Scout.

The Tasks feature is very useful for coordinating tasks and ensuring everything is considered in a ticket. This functionality is missing in Help Scout.

Plus, HelpSpace has more provisions for customizations in Docs and Blogs, while Help Scout is mainly focused on SEO rather than branding. More importantly, HelpSpace has an intuitive and easy interface that your team can learn to use in no time.

While Help Scout has more features, more doesn’t always equate to better. Sometimes, the excessiveness of features can make things complicated. That’s where HelpSpace pulls through, being simpler to navigate.

So, you don’t have to spend a lot of time or money on training your support team to use HelpSpace, since they’ll get the hang of it in no time.

How Is Help Scout Better?

Although most features between both tools are similar, Help Scout has some advanced provisions, such as extensive SEO options in the Knowledge Base. Plus, it offers Live Chat, which is absent in HelpSpace.

Most importantly, Help Scout integrates with multiple platforms, including the ones used for ecommerce and email marketing.

HelpSpace vs. Help Scout: Comparison Table

Here’s a brief look at how both platforms compare to each other:

Final Verdict

In conclusion, both customer support tools are impressive in their distinct ways. However, HelpSpace is aimed towards budding businesses with low budgets and fewer support needs, while Help Scout is ideal for upper-tier support requirements.

To put it simply, Help Scout has more features but HelpSpace is more fun and straightforward to use, which is a highly demanded feature of any customer support software.

Thus, HelpSpace is our pick, since the last thing you want to do to customer support is making it complicated.

Photo by Vanesa Giaconi on Unsplash