Help Scout

About Help Scout

Help Scout is a customer support platform founded in 2011, serving more than 12,000 customers including Basecamp, Buffer, and Trello. As a Public Benefit Corporation, Help Scout focuses on providing human-centered support tools that prioritize personal conversations over impersonal ticket numbers.

Help Scout uses a shared mailbox model where customer emails arrive in a collaborative inbox visible to the entire team. Unlike traditional ticketing systems that assign ticket numbers and send automated "Your ticket #12345 has been received" replies, Help Scout presents conversations as regular email threads to customers. This approach results in higher customer satisfaction scores for organizations that value personal, relationship-driven support.

Workflows (automation rules) in Help Scout automate conversation routing, tagging, assignment, and notifications based on conditions such as subject, customer email domain, mailbox, time of day, or custom fields. Workflows can be applied automatically to incoming conversations or triggered manually. Beacon is an embeddable live chat and help widget that provides real-time messaging, knowledge base article suggestions, and contact forms. Docs provides a knowledge base builder for self-service help articles organized by collection and category.

Help Scout offers three plans: Standard at $25/user/month (2 mailboxes, 1 Docs site, email and live chat, 100+ integrations, automated workflows, reporting), Plus at $50/user/month (5 mailboxes, 2 Docs sites, custom fields, advanced permissions, HubSpot/Salesforce/Jira integrations, HIPAA compliance), and Pro at custom pricing (25+ mailboxes, 10+ Docs sites, enterprise security, dedicated account manager). Help Scout integrates with Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Shopify, Zapier, Make, and Asana through its integrations directory.