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Intercom vs Help Scout Comparison: Which Is the Best for You?

Intercom vs Help Scout

Last Updated: March 2024

 If you’re looking for the right customer service solution for your company, choosing between Help scout vs Intercom can be difficult.

Well, we’ve got you covered. In this guide, let’s compare two of the most popular customer service solutions available in the market and see which one is better for your business: Intercom or Help scout. We’ll compare them overall while also focusing on their specific features to determine which one is a better fit for your company.

1. Live Chat (Final Winner: Intercom) Rating 4.5/5

Web Widget

Give customers access to your customer support team by embedding a customized widget onto your website.

  • Help Scout and Intercom both allow you to embed a live chat widget on your website to allow visitors to raise issues in real time.
  • The base pricing plan of both Intercom and HelpScout come with Live Chat for support. However, Help Scout starts at $20 per user per month.

Winner: Helpscout

LiveChat Customization

Customize your chat widget’s design, appearance, and messaging options to provide a personalized chat experience across platforms while also matching the look and tone of your brand.

  • Intercom includes a bunch of customization options, such as setting up a welcome message, messenger home apps, ensuring your customers leave an email, customizing the messenger’s style to match your brand, and so on.
  • Helpscout allows you to customize only the most basic aspects of the live chat interface. Button Style, Name, Color, toggle Help Scout branding on or off, Z-Index, and so on.

Winner: Intercom

Saved Replies

Create pre-made responses that are customized with your brand’s distinct tone and identity. You can even organize your response templates into categories based on common themes.

  • You can create saved replies from scratch in Helpscout via the mailbox Settings page or while chatting with customers.
  • Intercom includes not only saved replies but also macros for repetitive tasks such as assigning conversations after triage, tagging in a specific way, or responding and snoozing.

Winner: Intercom

Also read: 9 Best Intercom Alternatives & Competitors You Need To Know!

2. Customer Support Features (Final Winner: Intercom) Rating 4.5/5

Multi-channel Inbox

To manage customer communication at scale, organize customer questions from multiple channels, in a shared inbox that your entire team can access.

  • Both Help scout & Intercom bring all of your preferred channels, including live chat, social media, email, and SMS into one dashboard. 

Winners: Both

Ticketing System

The helpdesk includes a system for managing, assigning, and prioritizing customer inquiries. This enables your agents to engage customers through various channels and easily convert queries into tickets.

  • Helpscout also includes a streamlined system for finding, sorting, and managing support requests all in one place. It even displays customer data, previous conversations, and app activity alongside each support request, allowing you to provide faster, more personalized assistance.
  • Intercom, like most good helpdesks, allows you to categorize, prioritize, and assign issues as they arise. Intercom’s ticketing system allows you to route conversations to the appropriate team, gather all customer context in one place, and even create workflows.

Winners: Both 

Workflow Management

This feature prevents multiple agents from working on the same ticket at the same time. This allows you to save time while also better organizing the workflow of your team.

  • Workflows in Helpscout allow you to automate the time-consuming but critical tasks that slow down your team. You can configure conditions to perform various tasks ranging from simple filtering and routing to queue management, and so on.
  • With Intercom‘s Inbox rules, you can automatically assign, close, and tag conversations, prioritize conversations, and set SLAs for your team.

Winners: Both

3rd Party Integrations

Integrate the helpdesk directly into your website, as well as a large number of third-party stores and apps.

  • Both Help scout and Intercom allow you to integrate the helpdesks directly into your website, as well as numerous third-party stores and apps. 
  • However, in comparison to HelpScout, Intercom’s app store has a much larger selection of integrations.

Winners: Intercom

Support Bots

Support/conversational bots can be used to collect relevant customer information, increase agent productivity, and streamline the support experience.

  • Helpscout‘s bot solution is called Beacon, and it suggests relevant help content, provides live chat, and gives customers instant access to their support history.
  • Intercom lets you provide 24/7 automated support with its Resolution Bot. The bot enhances self-service by providing relevant answers based on what customers type. You can even set up bots in 38 different languages to automate responses.

Winner: Intercom

3. Social Media (Final Winner: Intercom) Rating 4.5/5

Facebook Integration

  • Helpscout does not provide native Facebook integration. 
  • Intercom: Messages from Facebook can be easily routed to Intercom’s Inbox, allowing you to keep all of your customer communication in one place. The Support and Convert plans include this integration.

Winner: Intercom

Instagram Integration

  • Intercom has its own Instagram app that allows you to manage Instagram conversations directly in your Intercom Inbox. This enables you to use automation, macros, SLAs, reports, inbox rules, and other features. Yes, the app is free as well.
  • Helpscout does not provide native Instagram integration. 

Winner: Intercom

WhatsApp Integration

  • Intercom does come with a native WhatsApp integration. You’ll have access to your own WhatsApp Manager. There is also an option to create your message templates. Intercom even comes with a WhatsApp specific pricing plan which allows you to manage your conversations from the Intercom inbox – costs $9/mo per seat.
  • Helpscout does not provide native WhatsApp integration. 

Winner: Intercom

Twitter Integration

  • Intercom does have a direct Twitter integration that routes your Direct Messages to your Intercom team inbox, allowing you to keep all of your customer communication in one place. (Please keep in mind that your Twitter @mentions will not be delivered to your team’s inbox.)
  • Helpscout does not provide native Twitter integration. 

Winner: Intercom

4. Self Service (Final Winner: Intercom) Rating 4.5/5

Knowledge base

Convert your most frequently asked support questions into a knowledge base of help articles so that customers can assist themselves.

  • Intercom allows you to create a single central location where your customers can find answers, tips, and other important information when they need it. You can even use an automated solution, such as Resolution Bot, to deliver specific articles and answer customer questions.
  • Helpscout‘s knowledge base feature is called Docs, and it is a simple knowledge base builder that allows you to create, organize, edit, and manage content. It includes organization options and search capabilities to ensure that your customers can easily find the information they require.

Winners: Both

Automation Features

Set up self-service features where your customers can check the status of their orders, tracking numbers, and shipping information, as well as create templated tickets to report order issues.

  • The majority of Intercom‘s self-service features come under chatbots that are used to answer common questions and share useful articles. You can even embed apps in Business Messenger like Content Showcase, Status page, or Shopify to provide a personalized, self-service experience.
  • Helpscout includes Beacon, a widget that you can embed on any page of your choice to allow customers to quickly access your knowledge base content. This means they can get the information they need to solve problems when and where they need it.

Winner: Intercom

5. Reports (Final Winner: Intercom) Rating 4.5/5

Knowledge Base Reports

The knowledge base/customer portal reports provide analytics that assist you in tracking the views of your knowledge base or guide. It also tells you whether or not people found your articles useful.

  • Intercom includes an Articles report, which allows you to quickly see which articles to write next, what’s popular, and, most importantly, which articles need to be improved. You can view a summary of your Help Center traffic, refine your results with filters, and even engage in View Article engagement.
  • The Docs Report from HelpScout helps you understand what your customers are looking for, what they find, and what percentage of customers still contact your team.

Winner: Intercom

Support Report

Reports that allow your team to make better real-time support management decisions.

  • Helpscout includes a variety of reporting features for evaluating your team’s support performance. The platform includes seven different reports, which can be accessed via the Reports menu at any time.
  • Intercom includes a real-time dashboard to help you better understand Inbox health and team capacity. You can easily monitor volume across teams, measure productivity, and filter data by Timeframe, Teams, and so on. Various metrics are also available to drill down into each section of your support system.

Winner: Intercom

Revenue Analytics Reports

Determine how much revenue your customer service team generates by guiding them through the purchasing process. This makes it simple to track customer conversion and revenue generated by pre-sale tickets.

  • Intercom comes with a revenue report that shows how much revenue Intercom has influenced, as well as the total leads and emails captured.
  • Helpscout, unfortunately, does not come with this feature. 

Winner: Intercom

Bottom Line:

So, Helpscout vs Intercom. With the above factors compared, which tool do you think is the right one for your company?

We hope this guide cleared up some questions and made it easier to choose a platform. 

If you want to make it easier for customers to contact your service team while also empowering your support reps to provide the best service possible, the Saufter.io could be the platform for you. It is a multi-channel customer service help desk designed for small businesses and enterprise teams. The platform is designed to be cost-effective, easy to set up, and most agents can get started on Saufter with little to no training.

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