7 Help Scout Alternatives for Customer-Obsessed Teams

Customer support is a vitally important aspect of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s how you take care of customers after the sale that matters. So it makes sense that your business should be investing in the right tools to help them support their customers whenever they have an issue. 

And yet many businesses are settling for insufficient tools that make customer support a burden rather than a profit center. They’re struggling to support a growing number of customers, resulting in long wait times and frustrated customers. 

It might be time for you to consider a proper customer support tool such as a help desk. Help Scout is one such example of a software that can take your customer support to the next level. 

In this article, we’re going to be considering Help Scout and a number of alternatives that help you support customers. 

A complete help desk, inside Gmail?

Keeping turns your Gmail into a fully featured help desk. It's not magic, but it feels magical.

See How in 2 Minutes

What is Help Scout?

Help Scout’s shared inbox, help center, and live chat support software provides your customer support team with the tools you need to efficiently handle customer communications at scale.

Help Scout’s shared inbox, help center, and live chat software enables your team to have access to the tools you need to efficiently handle customer communications. Emails are centralized in the Help Scout interface 

Help Scout offers a self-service knowledge base, also known as a help center. You can limit your customer support ticket volume by at least 30% with a knowledge base that’s designed for customer self-service. You’ll have more satisfied customers and fewer conversations so that everyone benefits.

You can use in-app messaging to proactively send messages in your app or on your website to deliver support, share helpful links, or make relevant announcements about your product.

In your shared inbox, you can ensure that every email gets to the right place with easy assignment to both individuals and teams. Send your teammates private notes to collaborate on problems and find solutions before replying to emails, facilitating internal communication within your team. With saved replies, you can create a searchable library of answers to frequently asked questions, then insert them into replies in two clicks. Tag customer conversations to automate workflows, categorize types of requests, and create detailed reports.

The drawback of Help Scout is that they offer limited support to their own customers. You’re forced to consult their help docs or send a website message in order to get help from the company. 

7 Help Scout alternatives

1. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is an omnichannel suite that offers the most complete support solution with the fastest time-to-value. This means you can simplify every customer experience and put customers back in the driving seat by offering the support they expect, in their channel of choice.

Freshdesk offers an advantage over Help Scout because it unifies all of your support channels into one platform. You can satisfy customers with availability in whatever channel they expect, and smooth transitions at any point in their journey. With Freshdesk, you can integrate a blend of conversational experiences including live-chat, web, mobile and contact center support.

Help customers find answers fast by launching AI-powered chatbots to easily guide customers in solving their questions. Customers have no need to contact your customer service agents when chatbots provide them with relevant answers. 

Freshdesk allows you to use the capabilities of collaborative ticketing and AI to deliver the best customer experience. You can prioritize, categorize, and assign support tickets to the correct support agents and take advantage of the potential of your entire organization to offer customer satisfaction.

Freshdesk pricing starts at $0 per agent per month. 

Check out our Freshdesk comparison post to find alternatives to Freshdesk. 

2. Kayako

Kayako is a help desk software platform that gives you frictionless customer service across email, live chat, and social media. The advantage of Kayako as an alternative to Help Scout is it brings your customer messaging channels together in a unified dashboard so you can have a complete view of all your customer information. 

You can avoid duplicate replies by seeing who is already working on a conversation, making collaboration much easier. Internal notes allow you to work together behind the scenes to share knowledge on a ticket. It’s free to invite your wider team to contribute behind the scenes so you can all work together on resolving customer tickets. 

The main advantage of Kayako is their live chat software. Kayako’s help desk solution includes their live chat software as one of the many tools to help you with your customer support success. Kayako’s live chat tool enables you to provide a personalized, engaging live chat experience whenever your customers need it. 

What’s more, you can help customers in real time across every channel—all from within Kayako’s dashboard. It’s quick and easy to customize their live chat software and integrate it into your website, iOS and Android apps.

Kayako’s pricing starts at $60 per agent per month. 

3. ProProfs

ProProfs is another help desk solution that offers a viable Help Scout alternative. It enables you to manage all your emails in one place using their shared inbox, significantly increasing your time to resolution for all your customer tickets. 

ProProfs’ help desk ticketing system captures all your incoming support requests from multiple channels and guarantees they end up in your help desk dashboard. It doesn’t matter if a customer reaches out to your business via live chat, email, or simply logs a complaint through your help center, the support ticket system allows you to keep a firm track of all customer communications.

With the right ticketing software like ProProfs, you can automatically log tickets, route them to relevant agents, allow agents to access necessary information about customers, and make customer interactions simpler

Assign tickets to the right agents, track the progress of your tickets, resolve issues, and close tickets, all from a shared dashboard. You always stay on top of who is working on which ticket and avoid sharing more than one response to the same email. You can prioritize tickets that need instant attention and avoid wasting time looking through the queue for urgent requests.

ProProfs pricing starts at $10 per agent per month. 

4. Crisp

Crisp gives your customer experience a human touch as a complete business messaging platform that gathers support teams, conversations, data and knowledge, all in one place. Crisp aims to unify your customer support, sales and marketing teams in one platform to deliver the best customer experience. 

The main advantage of Crisp is that its shared inbox centralizes all your conversations, including live chat, emails or Messenger and Instagram DM to WhatsApp and phone calls.  Collaborate effortlessly inside one inbox, no matter how your customers decide to contact you. 

You can sell more by automating your sales pipeline using bots. Retarget customers by sending target emails and in-app messages to automate your marketing campaigns. Crisp offers live chat that enables you to simplify your customer support, replying to customers all within the same dashboard. 

Users can access the knowledge base directly from within Crisp’s live chat software. You can even use Crisp to build an internal knowledge base that centralizes all of your company’s information for better knowledge management. 

Crisp pricing starts at $0 per agent per month. 

5. SupportBee

SupportBee is support ticket software that enables your customer support team to organize, prioritize and collaborate on incoming emails. It’s a simple system that remains invisible to your customers while providing features for agents to collectively resolve customer issues. You can assign tickets to individual agents to make sure no tickets get lost in the chaos. 

SupportBee also offers an integrated knowledge base software that enables customers to self-serve their most common questions. If customers do make the move to contact your support team, agents can easily insert links to the knowledge base in their replies to save time on resolving tickets. 

One advantage of SupportBee is they have a customer portal that enables your customers to send, manage and track the status of their enquiries. This creates enhanced visibility for your customers who are able to see how close they are to a resolution. 

SupportBee’s platform is very similar to email so your agents won’t have a steep learning curve when becoming familiar with how to use the software. Unlike similar solutions, you can get set up in minutes rather than hours or days, and get started with supporting your customers much faster. 

SupportBee pricing starts at 

Check out our comparison post on alternatives to SupportBee. 

6. Trengo

Trengo is an omnichannel communication platform that unifies all messaging channels into one single view, and makes customer communication easy. Similar to Freshdesk, Trengo combines email, WhatsApp Business, Instagram, and Live Chat for a coherent customer support experience. 

Trengo makes working together a better experience. You can assign messages to teams or agents, automate repetitive tasks, and keep your team in the loop, staying within the same tab. Trengo allows you to create workflows to automatically assign conversations to the right team, add labels, send automatic replies or create your own SLA’s. 

You can build no-code chatbots with Trengo’s intuitive drag and drop builder and automate conversations via all channels. Customer support becomes much easier with Trengo when you can provide self-service with bots, as well as a self-service knowledge base where you can post common FAQs. 

Trengo offers the ability to gather feedback from your customers. You can send out CSAT surveys through email, WhatsApp, Instagram, and all your other channels to find out how your customers are feeling about your service.

Trengo pricing starts at $15 per agent per month. 

7. Keeping

Have you considered Keeping, the customer support software that works directly inside Gmail? Keeping acts as an extension for your favorite email platform so your agents need never learn a new tool to take advantage of a full-featured help desk. Keeping unifies your customer emails within Gmail and turns them into tickets. Track the status of your customer tickets and assign them to specific agents for enhanced productivity. 

Read More: See How Keeping Compares to Help Scout

Keeping is so much more than a shared inbox. Analytics help you keep track of your agents’ performance, including first response time and more. Automations let you automate manual tasks so you can save time and help customers much more efficiently. Keeping doesn’t require a technical degree to get started – all you need is a proficiency with Gmail. 

Keeping offers a fantastic experience within its shared inbox to help your agents solve tickets together. You can conduct internal conversations with your colleagues regarding particular emails, so you don’t have to switch to a third party tool to solve a ticket. 

If you opt for Keeping, you’ll find all your support needs taken care of. Gone are the days of emails slipping through the cracks and customers becoming dissatisfied. Agents will be working together as a productive team and be able to provide the best customer experience. 

Wrapping up

Help Scout can be a good option if you’re looking to upgrade your customer support software. It offers live chat, shared inbox, and help center to enhance the service you’re able to offer your customers. However, it’s important to consider the Help Scout alternatives out there. Help Scout might be too complex if all you’re looking for is a shared inbox to help your customers. 

We’ve already mentioned Keeping as a viable alternative to Help Scout. You’ll be amazed at the efficiency with which you’ll be able to respond to customer emails and collaborate effectively with your team. The big advantage of Keeping is you don’t need to learn a brand new platform and all your emails are stored within Gmail, so you retain access to your data. 

Whatever you choose, make sure to take advantage of the free trials that often come with your new software. You’ll need to road test how your new help desk plays with your existing customer support workflows, and whether it is suitable for your needs.