Help Scout vs Freshdesk

Not sure if Freshdesk or Help Scout is a better choice for your business requirements? Then, take a look at the Freshdesk vs HelpScout comparison of its features in this article.

We talk about the basic functions that a service desk usually offers along with specific features that help you determine which one, Help Scout or Freshdesk is the best fit for you.

Freshdesk vs HelpScout Feature Comparison

Helpdesk Features (Final Winner: Freshdesk) Rating ⭐4/5

Ticketing System

Enables you to handle the requests received from customers via different channels.

• Freshdesk – Create, track and manage your incoming tickets coming from multiple channels in one inbox.
• Help Scout – Refers to tickets as conversations. Now, with Help Scout you can create new conversations/ tickets, manage them and give replies to user conversations.

Winner: Both

Team Collaboration

Connects individuals inside and outside your team so they can work together to resolve complex user requests.

• Freshdesk – Discuss parts of tickets with experts across your company by sharing tickets. Split complex problems into smaller child tickets, and link all of them together to keep track of widespread issues.
• Help Scout – Send your team members private messages to collaborate and find solutions. Through the Help Scout app, you may keep in touch with your conversation thread to get new updates.

Winner: Both

Collision Detection

Ensures that multiple agents do not send replies to the same ticket or user request which usually causes a collision and confusion.

• Freshdesk – This feature makes sure that multiple employees do not work on the same ticket. While the Traffic Cop function stops duplicate responses that have not taken recent developments into account.
• Help Scout – Your agent’s reply to a conversation is stopped when another reply is added to it by a different user. It displays visual indicators so you know when someone else is using the same conversation.

Winner: Both

SLA Management

A service Level Agreement (SLA) is an accord made by your organization to end-user as a promise to meet minimum expectations. The SLA management software allows you to set up multiple SLA policies to make sure you fulfill that promise. 

• Freshdesk – Generate different SLA policies for various ticket types. Send in-app and email reminders to your agents. Configure the right people to escalate information about any SLA breaches.
• Help Scout – Do not have an official SLA feature, but by using a combination of features like workflow and report views you can to some extent achieve SLA goals. 

Winner: Freshdesk

Supported Systems (Winner: Freshdesk) Rating ⭐5/5

Email

Check whether the software application delivers you email support or not.

• Freshdesk – Automatically converts support emails into tickets so that you can track, manage, and resolve them easily. That means Freshdesk offers email support.
• Help Scout – Manages emails sent by your customers by changing them into support conversations. In this way, Help Scout also provides email support.

Winner: Both

Live Chat

• Freshdesk – Engage your users through Freshchat messaging application by adding a widget on your website. You can navigate to the chat queues from your dashboard.
• Help Scout – Shows a live chat window only when someone is available for help. When the chat widget is not available, you may direct support requests to your email queue.

Winner: Both

Phone

• Freshdesk – Set up a fully functional call center. Also, track and record your user request calls by converting them into support tickets.
• Help Scout – When a user calls, you can log all the details in their profile. However, to include all the benefits of a call center you have to add phone support integrations. 

Winner: Freshdesk

Self-Service (Final Winner: Freshdesk) Rating ⭐5/5

Knowledge Base

As per Help Scout, you can reduce your ticket volume by 30% by launching a knowledge base on your website. Let’s see what functions both software offer to design your Knowledge base.

• Freshdesk – Write, format, add various elements like images, audio, video, etc., and publish your articles. It also has SEO attributes to optimize your content.
• Help Scout – Create articles, and add images, videos, tables, hyperlinks and publish them. Also, you may configure SEO options. Build multiple knowledge bases for your website.

Winner: Both

Multilingual Support

You can find out whether the software allows you to display content in multiple languages or not in this section.

• Freshdesk –  Supports 42 languages. With content versioning and approvals, you can manage translations. Also, monitor the performance of your language-specific content.
• Help Scout – Translate articles into the language of your choice. And, edit the default copy to match the voice of your brand. You may also translate the labels visible to your user. 

Winner: Both

Help Widget

• Freshdesk – Embed the knowledge base into your website to help your users in finding the answers with the Help widget. Clients can reach out to you on the website, mobile, and even chat.
• Help Scout – Using the Beacon Help widget, you can suggest relevant knowledge base articles and address frequently asked questions. Your customers can look for help via desktop, mobile, or tablet.

Winner: Both

Community Forum

Allows your users to connect with each other and discuss their issues on community forums.

• Freshdesk – Your Customers can ask questions, post tips, and engage in discussions about your products or services. They can also upvote the posts in the community forum. 
• Help Scout – Does not support community forums instead they use a passive approach of sending relevant content and information via email to your users.

Winner: Freshdesk

Chatbot

A software application that converses with your users to gather any useful information and resolve common problems.

• Freshdesk – Chatbot powered by Freddy AI delivers precise and instant answers to your user queries. It responds by referring to relevant knowledge base content based on your customers’ questions.
• Help Scout – It does not have a chatbot but a widget that looks like a chat widget displays two options. One shows your FAQs and knowledge base content while the other gives your support team contact options.

Winner: Freshdesk

Automation (Final Winner: Both) Freshdesk Rating ⭐5/5, Help Scout Rating ⭐5/5

Workflow

Assists in automating repetitive tasks so your team can focus on other important work. It also helps in keeping the response time low.

• Freshdesk – Assign tickets to your agents by considering keywords, requester, or properties, current workload, and skill. You can perform time-triggered and event-triggered actions on tickets.
• Help Scout –  Workflow automation act based on your conditions set to do the simple process like filtering and routing to complex processes. You may organize, prioritize, and sort conversations.

Winner: Both

Auto Responses

Informs your customer that you received their email and your team is working to resolve it.

• Freshdesk – With canned responses, you can save replies to common questions and reuse them. It enables you to set up rules, respond to every ticket even after work hours, and configure automatic email replies.
• Help Scout – Enabling auto-reply sends templated responses to your customers. Moreover, you may set the office hours so that it can reply to your users in that time period only.

Winner: Both

Reporting & Analytics (Final Winner: Freshdesk) Rating ⭐4.5/5

Team Productivity

Learn how every employee is doing to understand what needs to be done to improve your overall business performance.

• Freshdesk – Monitor your helpdesk productivity with key metrics. Evaluate each employee’s performance. Moreover, customize the measures and visualization elements to build the reports in your own way.
• Help Scout – Evaluate the volume of requests by channel, and busiest hours. Know your team’s productivity. Get the phone call summary and check the individual’s performance.

Winner: Freshdesk

Customer Satisfaction

• Freshdesk – Measure CSAT levels to understand what needs to be improved in your support system.
• Help Scout – Track your user satisfaction ratings and get a happiness score to know how your customers are feeling.

Winner: Both

Freshdesk vs HelpScout – Conclusion

Hope the Freshdesk vs HelpScout comparison of their features cleared your doubts. Then, you can select the best software for your business.

In case you are still not sure which one to pick, you can go to Saufter.io which is an all-around customer service application. It delivers automation, marketing, integrations (including eCommerce & social media), and all basic functionalities such as email, live chat, SMS, phone answering, and self-help services.