In today's time, keeping your customers happy is one of the most imperative business practices. Fortunately, customer support tools make it much easier to achieve this.
Depending on the scale of their operations and budget, there are quite a few customer support softwares that businesses can use. Intercom and HelpSpace are two of these tools that have received a lot of positive feedback from users.
Intercom is an interactive customer communication software that enables 24/7 communication with customers through website chat, emails, and social media.
Meanwhile, HelpSpace combines the capabilities of Intercom and Help Scout where it allows you to automatically capture all your incoming emails and turn them into an actionable customer database.
Here's a comparison between HelpSpace and Intercom to help you decide which of the two is the right pick for your business.
What is HelpSpace?
HelpSpace is a customer support software designed for small to mid-scale businesses, which helps organizations manage and track issues, communicate with customers, share the workload with tasks, and keep a record of any contact made.
It has a ton of features that help you handle your support requests. Together, these features allow businesses to take care of their customers’ needs and queries.
What Can You Do With HelpSpace?
HelpSpace is designed for businesses with moderate customer support needs. Here are some ways the tool makes customer support a breeze for you.
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 Intercom?
Intercom is a customer support tool like HelpSpace that allows businesses to respond to customer complaints using email, social networks, and live chat.
Along with live chat, it also offers email messages, a help center, product tours, and apps. Intercom doesn’t only provide services for ecommerce but also for other businesses, such as financial services, healthcare, and education.
Whether you are a small business at your early stage or an enterprise, Intercom has solutions for your needs.
What Can You Do With Intercom?
Intercom is a hybrid tool that also includes services for marketing and business management.
Business Management
With Intercom’s business management, you can do the following:
Conduct live chat
Automate workflows using chatbots
Help customers in self-service
Talk to customers across different platforms
Deliver outbound messages through your app or website
Personalize customer experiences
Collaborative Inbox
Owing to the collaborative inbox, your support team can personalize the customer experience and make sure they respond to all customer queries in the best way possible.
Collect Customer Data
Intercom also lets you integrate data from multiple channels and study the customer’s up-to-date history. Here are the kinds of data you can gather:
Behavioral data
Custom data
Conversation data
Company data
How is HelpSpace Better?
HelpSpace is an ideal option for businesses that want to offer self-service solutions to their customers and not max out their support budget by investing in an exorbitantly priced tool.
After all, your customer service team is one of the most precious assets you have. They are what keep your business running, and without them, you wouldn’t be able to make sure your clients are satisfied.
With HelpSpace, they can deliver better support and make more money for your business while doing it.
HelpSpace has a very user-friendly interface that lets users manage their teams in a single dashboard. You can even personalize different workspaces to give each member of your support crew separate profiles so that they can focus on their roles exclusively. With customized widgets and self-service tools, there's no hassle or confusion about who does what.
How is Intercom Better?
Intercom is a better option for businesses that want to combine their customer support offerings with business and marketing efforts. Moreover, it offers Bots and Live Chat, two features absent in HelpSpace.
However, it’s also pricier and isn’t ideal for businesses that may have multiple teams or need unlimited contacts.
HelpSpace vs. Intercom: Comparison Table
Before choosing a customer support tool, it’s important to compare the two. Here’s a brief look at how both platforms compare to each other:
Features | HelpSpace | Intercom |
Pricing 10 users for 12 months | $780 | $2568 |
Additional User | $5 | $19 |
Additional Mailbox | $5 | — |
Contacts | Unlimited | 2000/month |
Tasks | Yes | No |
Docs Customization | Yes | No |
Ticket Management | Yes | Yes |
Multi-Channel Communication | Yes | Yes |
Automated Routing | Yes | Yes |
Multiple Teams | Yes | No |
Final Verdict
Summing up, both Intercom and HelpSpace are impressive in their own ways but the former is better for larger businesses with more marketing and business management-related needs while the latter is a better pick for small to moderate businesses that require unified inboxes and self-service Doc sites.
HelpSpace wins over Intercom in terms of pricing, being more than two times cheaper.
Moreover, you get unlimited contacts and can add a Docs site for a minimal price. For us, HelpSpace is the clear winner here since it’s not only cheaper but also very functional for businesses of multiple sizes and customer bases.
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