Help Scout

Help Scout is help desk software with a shared inbox, Docs knowledge base and Beacon widget for small and growing support teams; a Free tier covers 5 users.

Help Scout is help desk software for support teams that want to answer customer email, chat and messages from one shared inbox instead of a personal mailbox. It is made by Help Scout PBC, a Delaware public benefit corporation founded in 2011 with a listed address in Boston and a fully remote team, and its site names no parent company. The platform is sold under one name, with the Inbox, the Docs knowledge base and the Beacon widget as parts of the same account. Inbox is the shared help desk. Conversations from email aliases, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger land in one queue, where agents assign, tag, snooze and reply, leave internal notes, mention teammates, and see collision indicators when a colleague is already viewing the same thread. Workflows organise, prioritise, escalate and assign conversations when set conditions are met, and Routing assigns new conversations Round Robin or Balanced by fewest active assignments. AI Drafts writes a reply from past conversations and help content, AI Assist expands, shortens, edits or translates text, AI Summarize condenses a long thread into bullet points, and the AI Answers chatbot resolves questions from the knowledge base and other sources as a paid add-on. Docs publishes a branded help center with custom CSS, restricted sites and contact forms. Beacon embeds a help widget with articles, a contact form and live chat on any website page or inside an app. Custom fields, a secure customer portal, satisfaction ratings, the Happiness and All Channels reports and a native iOS and Android app complete the product. Help Scout is built for small and mid-sized support teams, from a founder answering replies alone to a full support department, and for e-commerce, SaaS and service businesses whose customers write in by email first. Team leads who want automation on top of email, and operations managers who need SLA targets, SSO and HIPAA compliance on the top tier, both fit the platform. Each agent is a seat on a monthly or annual subscription, with one login covering Inbox, Docs and Beacon, and extra Inboxes and Docs sites added on top. Support teams bring it in to turn a support alias into an assigned queue, to publish self-serve answers that reduce repeat questions, to bring chat and social messages to the same agents who handle email, and to report first response and resolution times by user, team and channel. It connects to Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot on the Plus and Pro tiers, logs phone calls through Aircall, and shows Stripe, Pipedrive, Mailchimp and Magento data in a sidebar app beside each conversation. Slack and Twilio extend the channels it can pull from.