Intro to Help Desk Apps + What We Use

Updated October 9th, 2024

This post is for anyone not using customer support software, or considering trying a new help desk app.

I hope our research and experience helps you save time and level up your workflow.

My team and I researched and tried various help desk apps, set on finding a full functioning app that's easy to use, has nice automations, and an agreeable price.

Summary: Help Scout won. We now use it for support system + knowledge base. We love it! ⭐️

Contents

Help desk apps are awesome!

We try to make our apps easy to use and add documentation, but still having a help desk app has been on the task list for awhile.

We'd been using a combination of email, Notion, Google Sheets, and Slack to manage customer support. It worked well (we've always received nice props about our service in our app store reviews) but in the spirit of automation and trying new tools we decided to try some help desk software.

Now I can't imagine ever not using help desk software. So many features! And automations! 🤓

Why we love Help Scout

Features

• Loads of features and customizations
• Great ticketing system, notes, tagging, information about customers
• Automations (automatic followups and ticket actions, organizing tasks, etc)
• In-app beacon with searchable instant answers connected to the knowledge base
• Easy to use knowledge base software / website setup
• Has a mobile phone app
• Live chat that integrates easily with your ticket system
• More features that we haven't even fully explored yet

We like the beacon a lot for people to find quick answers or contact us. See it in our Order Automator app if you're using it (great app! 😃), if not just go to Help Scout's site to see how they have it setup for them.

Live Chat

HelpScout Chat Highlights

• Smart ways of showing who's online and available for chat, without having to manually set your status
• Save chat logs and optionally auto-email to the customer
• Easy integration to change to a support ticket

For Shopify stores, I think HelpScout is an amazing all in one solution for help desk, ticket managing, live chat, and more, but I also want to mention Zipchat, a Shopify specific chatbot app.

I tested this app and was really impressed, instantly saw so many queries it couuld help automate. I wish this app existed back when I managed my Shopify store, I would 100% be using this for a chat app to lighten the load on support requests.

Zipchat Highlights

• Give instant answers and cut down on support inquiries
• Increase AOV by recommending cross-sell products
• Provide order updates and tracking links

Support

Their support is amazing. On a couple occasions I sent a bulleted list of questions and quickly got answers.

They add updates to the app (currently adding AI features) and communicate well in general.

The app works great, we haven't had any issues.

Knowledge base

The knowledge base software is super easy to use. You create articles, categorize them, then they generate into a website.

I would like the website to be more customizable, but at least you can edit the CSS and some other minor changes.

Here's the knowledge base for our app Order Automator: support.orderautomator.com.

Pricing

We chose the $22/mo Standard plan, it's got everything we need.

Compared to the other apps we tried (see links and reviews below):

• Intercom was significantly more expensive, we would be doing the $100 plan. It's a nice app though if you're wanting to use live chat and chatbots
• Freshdesk has a cheaper $15 plan, but for our case we'd need to do the $50 plan
• HelpShelf was $25/mo or $55/mo depending on users but doesn't include ticketing or knowledge base

Value, time saved, user experience, and customer experience for our users are the most important factors for me, it was just a coincidence that Help Scout happened to be the lower price option from the apps we tried.

Other apps we considered

We checked out a lot of apps based on recommendations and Google searches. Here are the top 3 we considered aside from Help Scout.

Intercom

Intercom seems to be the strongest help desk app for live chat and chatbots.

The app is great but was significantly more expensive and we didn't need all the features included.

The chatbots are cool and their AI features are promising.

Their in-app beacon is stronger and more customizable than Help Scout's.

I'd recommend trying Intercom if you want to offer live chat.

Freshdesk

Based on initial research, Freshdesk was my first pick before trying others, but turned out to be one of the worst customer experiences I've ever had with an app.

They have a nice feature set and good software, but their customer support completely ignored us, so we couldn't finish setting things up or getting our questions answered to make a decision.

If they improve their customer service they may be worth a try, but I feel obligated to share our experience here, because I would not recommend them, we wasted a lot of time and frustration trying Freshdesk.

The experience: I signed us up for the free trial, my support manager and I started exploring the app, configuring, and setting up the knowledge base. We had some questions and needed help to finish preparing to go live, so I contacted customer support.

They completely ignored emails, yet kept sending random automated email messages. After being ignored for 10 days (after I signed up for the free trial), I lost faith. Here's my experience recounted on that 10th day:

• I emailed Freshdesk support 9 days ago with some questions and still nobody has responded
• I logged in the app and chatted with an agent last week to ask what was going on, they didn't know, I accepted a demo offer, they said someone would get back within 24 hours, nobody has gotten back
• I asked again for a product demo 3 days after that, ignored again
• Checked spam filter of course, and I was receiving some automated messages so ruled that out
• I replied to the automated messages but those got ignored too

The pricing was appealing at $15/mo for the starter plan, but in our case we have 2 apps that use inboxes so we would have had to do the $50 plan anyways, double the cost per user than our Help Scout plan.

I can't trust a software company that ignores customer support emails, but that's something that can be improved, so they might be worth a try for you, but I would test out their support early, before you invest time in the app or creating knowledge base articles like we did. 🥴

HelpShelf

HelpShelf is useful but limited.

We really like the in-app beacon and may try using it in the future, but Help Scout's beacon does most of what we want, and they seem to be open to updating it in the future, we'll see how that goes.

HelpShelf does have a really cool feedback function in their app widget that I like. It might be something we use as an add-on.

Our evolved system

I enjoy using Help Scout and it has helped our workflow so much I wanted to write an article about it. I like sharing tips to help other people level up their businesses, I know how hard the journey is. ✊

We now use this system:

• Help Scout for inbound support emails, ticketing system, live chat, managing customers and notes
• Slack for internal team chat (we communicate in Help Scout via tagged notes but chat is nice)
• Notion to track customizations and feature requests
• ConvertKit to manage our email list (automated emails on app install, checkin, uninstall, and also partners)
• Help Scout for FAQ and knowledge base

This new system is a game changer. If you run a business and don't have a help desk app, try it out, 100% worth it.

If you have a Shopify store or work with one, contact us, you'll be greeted with an automated message generated by Help Scout, let us know what you think. 🙂