Help Scout vs Messagely
The co-founders behind Help Scout include Nick Francis, Jared McDaniel, and Denny Swindle, who were business partners who ran a web design consultancy in Nashville, Tennessee. After Francis, McDaniel and Swindle participated in accelerator program Techstars Boston, they officially launched Help Scout. The company raised $800,000 in angel funding in 2011, and then received $6M in their Series A in 2015.
Brightwurks was renamed Help Scout in 2015, and the company now powers 9,000+ support teams in over 140 countries. Help Scout has won several awards and accolades; it was named a “marketing tool to know” by Business2Community and a “game-changing software solution” by Business.com. That aside, the company was also featured in BostInno’s “16 Boston Startups To Watch in 2016”.
Help Scout has achieved great things in the eight years that they’ve been around, and they’ve earned a great reputation for themselves. But is Help Scout the best customer service tool out there, or does Messagely bring more value to the table? Read on to find out more.
Should you switch from Help Scout? Factors to consider.
Chatbots
Live chat
Scope of tool
Chatbots
The way we see it, chatbots are an absolute godsend to sales, marketing, and customer support teams. These bots help to automate all the tedious, manual tasks that, quite frankly, aren’t worth your effort. This frees up your time, and allows you to focus on fine-tuning campaigns and improving strategies.
Help Scout is a pretty bare-bones customer support tool, and it doesn’t come with any sort of chatbot functionality. If you use Help Scout, you’ll either have to pay for a standalone chatbot tool, or miss out on the huge benefits that chatbots bring to the table.
Messagely, on the other hand, comes with chatbots which help to acquire and support customers. To capture more leads at the top of your funnel, use Messagely’s sales bots to qualify prospects and schedule meetings. To keep your existing customers happy, set up a support chatbot on your site that can answer customer enquiries, 24/7. Now that’s what they call working smart.
Live chat
If you’re not using live chat, you’re missing out. According to statistics, 77% of customers won’t make a purchase if there’s no live chat, and live chat generates an impressive 48% increase in revenue per chat hour.
While Help Scout comes with a live chat feature (Beacon), note that this is only accessible for users on desktop, and that you won’t be able to chat with your customers if you’re on mobile. With Messagely, on the other hand, you can chat with your users regardless of whether you’re logged into your desktop, or Messagely’s iOS and Android apps. This makes it easy for you to connect with your customers as and when they need you.
Scope of tool
When choosing new software, you can either look for multiple specialized tools, or a tool that’s engineered to meet several business needs. Here, it makes more sense to use a single platform to take care of all your customer acquisition, engagement and support needs, rather than relying on several platforms to do the same thing.
What are the benefits of using a single platform? First and foremost, using just one platform means you’re keeping all your data and analytics in one place. In other words: you don’t need to worry about whether your data is syncing up properly, and you’ll be able to keep track of your key metrics and indicators more easily. On top of that, using a single tool typically works out to be more cost-effective than paying for multiple tools as well.
How do Help Scout and Messagely fare when it comes to scope? We won’t deny that Help Scout does what it does well, but it’s unfortunately limited in scope. While you can use Help Scout to improve your customer support efforts, the tool simply isn’t built to help you take care of your other business objectives, such as acquiring and engaging customers.
Messagely, on the other hand, is a feature-rich platform that does so much more. Like Help Scout, Messagely comes with a helpdesk that allows you to support your customers and answer their questions. But that’s not all – you can also use Messagely to generate new leads and engage your existing customers. For instance, with Messagely, you can upsell customers on free trials and convert them to paid users, trigger personalized messages to re-engage users, and more. Basically, we help you take care of customers throughout their entire lifecycle.
Help Scout is a reputable tool that’s particularly useful for customer support, but it’s not as versatile as Messagely, which you can use to acquire, engage and support your customers. All in all, Messagely is a worthy Help Scout alternative – if you’re looking for an all-in-one-tool to drive your business growth, definitely choose Messagely over Help Scout.
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