What Is Help Scout?

Help Scout is an AI support suite that turns customer conversations into growth and retention. It lets businesses manage all of their customer support channels — email, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram — in one place that's designed for collaboration.

For over 15 years, Help Scout has helped teams not only deliver world-class service but also understand the larger story of every customer relationship. Intuitive enough to adopt in a day and powerful enough to grow with your business, 80% of Help Scout customers stay for 4+ years.

Help Scout's history

Help Scout was founded in 2011 by Nick Francis, Jared McDaniel, and Denny Swindle. Prior to building Help Scout, they ran a professional services business building websites and apps for clients. One of the apps they built became very popular, and as a result, they suddenly had a huge volume of support requests to manage.

Nick, Jared, and Denny tried to find a help desk that would help them manage all of the requests they were receiving, but they didn't like anything they tried. All of the options transformed customers from people into ticket numbers and communications from basic email replies into complex systems where customers had to create a login just to see a response.

That frustration with the support software market led them to the decision to build Help Scout, a help desk built around "conversations": customer support interactions that feel like one-on-one communications with someone who is happy to help.

“We built our own tools in order to just make the emails from our system seem personalized and seem like [they] really came from a friend. That’s the experience that our customers wanted at that time. And it really hasn’t changed."

Nick Francis

Help Scout co-founder and chairman of the board on The Supportive Podcast (2025)

Today, Help Scout continues to serve customer-first teams that believe great support is a revenue-driver, not a cost center. It's a fully remote company with team members working in more than 100 different cities across the world, it's used by more than 12,000 companies to support their customers, and it's been the home of more than three billion customer conversations over the last 15 years.

What is Help Scout used for?

Help Scout is used for managing customer conversations as a team, ensuring every question gets a helpful answer and no request slips through the cracks. Teams use it to:

• Answer customer questions: See requests from every channel in one platform instead of checking email, chat, SMS, and social messages separately.

• Let customers find answers quickly: Publish help articles and customer portals so customers can solve common problems on their own.

• Handle customer requests automatically with AI: Deploy AI agents that answer accurately, route conversations to the right people, and improve with every interaction.

• Collaborate on tricky requests: Loop in someone from finance, engineering, or a partner organization without forwarding emails back and forth.

• Reach out before customers have to ask: Send proactive messages to let customers know about outages, share tips for using a feature, or announce upcoming changes.

• Monitor how things are going: Track volume, response times, customer satisfaction, and more across all channels to spot problems, identify when it's time to hire, and make better decisions across the whole business.

What does Help Scout do?

Help Scout is built around four key products.

1. Inbox

Inbox brings conversations from email, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram into one space that's built for collaboration between teams and AI. 

Teammates can assign conversations, leave private notes, and see when someone else is replying so they don’t have to worry about stepping on each other's toes. Automatically tag, assign, and route conversations to make sure they get the right owner every time, and set SLAs to ensure you’re getting back to customers in a reasonable timeframe.

Inbox also includes all the tools you need to help customers answer their own questions. Use Docs to build a custom knowledge base and publish help articles. Beacon is an embeddable widget that lets your customers search your help center from any page on your website or app. If they don’t find what they’re looking for, they can contact your team from the same widget via email or live chat, or they can connect with an AI agent.

Inbox includes pre-built integrations with 100+ third-party tools that teams commonly use as part of their support workflows, such as CRMs, ecommerce platforms, and phone support systems.

In their first year with Help Scout, companies take on 56% more conversations on average.

2. Envoy

Envoy combines frontier AI models with insights learned from more than three billion conversations to power Scout, an AI agent that resolves 73% of conversations on average.

Scout connects to all of the places you store knowledge about your company, products, and customers so it can answer customers' questions accurately and consistently. It learns from each conversation and suggests improvements for future conversations, so it continuously improves.

You control exactly which conversations Scout handles, whether that’s all of them or only specific types. If it’s unable to answer a question or it receives a request that you’d prefer for your team to handle, it escalates the conversation to the right person with full context.

You can provide custom instructions on voice, tone, and brand guidelines so Scout consistently responds like your team would. And if you want it to respond differently for specific customers, you can create distinct roles it can adopt for those conversations.

Test mode allows you to simulate conversations with Scout on any topic before pushing it live for customers, and once Scout is live, it provides a log of every conversation — including a breakdown of every knowledge source used for its responses — so you always have oversight.

Envoy also lets you put your own custom AI agents to work. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or an agent built in-house to your conversations, customer profiles, and Docs through the Help Scout MCP or API.

3. Copilot

Copilot acts as a senior-level teammate built right into the Inbox.

Instead of doing everything from scratch, your team can lean on Copilot to instantly draft responses to incoming messages. The drafts are based on past replies your team has sent and your knowledge base content. Your team simply reviews the draft, adjusts it if needed, and clicks send.

Copilot can also summarize long back-and-forth threads; fix tone, spelling issues, and grammar mistakes in replies you've written yourself; and translate text into other languages. 

4. Signal

Signal gives support leaders the data they need to spot friction early and make better decisions across the whole business. It identifies common topics and themes across all your conversations so you can spot recurring issues, uncover trends, and understand what’s driving support demand. 

Built-in reports make it easy to understand conversation volume, response and resolution times, SLA performance, customer satisfaction, and individual teammate performance.

What makes Help Scout different from other support platforms?

Help Scout's superpower is its focus on quality.

Every feature we add to the platform is built with the goal of helping our customers deliver higher-quality support to their customers. The features you'll find in Help Scout are the ones you need the most, those that will enable you and your team to do your jobs efficiently and effectively.

“Every time I was in the queue and I saw a pain point that a customer was having, I felt this need to solve it.”

Denny Swindle

Help Scout co-founder and CTO on The Supportive Podcast (2025)

We don't launch half-baked features just to jump on a trend. We have a 15-year track record of helping businesses nail the fundamentals of great customer service through every technology trend and hype cycle. We took a little longer than the competition to release our AI features because we weren't willing to ask our customers to use an unproven product that, in the case of AI agents, would be communicating directly with their customers.

“When we were first building our AI products… trying to convince the team to use those products was really difficult, but I wanted that tension to exist… I felt like we had to earn the trust of our own team before we could bring those products to market.”

Nick Francis

Help Scout co-founder and chairman of the board on The Supportive Podcast (2025)

While many other platforms optimize for pushing every conversation toward AI, Help Scout optimizes for the right response — not just the fastest. It’s built to discern those make-or-break moments that need human attention so that you can let an AI agent run without worrying it’ll step on conversations you’d prefer for your team to handle. Automation can strengthen customer relationships or strain them. Help Scout is built to tell the difference.

Help Scout is very intuitive to use — most people learn the platform in an hour and can become power users in a day — and all of our features and channels operate as one cohesive system.

Experienced customer support professionals write every word of all of the content we publish. We've been hosting live classes for eight years now, giving new customers the opportunity to ask questions and get training without having to pay for professional services or, worse, hire a third-party implementation agency.

When you choose Help Scout over the competition, you can have confidence that what you'll get is high-quality: from the product itself to the support you receive and even the content you read in our newsletters and on our blog.

To top it all off, Help Scout is considerably more affordable than other platforms offering similar features and channels. Help Scout's paid plans run between $30 and $40 less per user per month than Zendesk's Suite plans, between as much as $57 less per user per month than Intercom's plans, and between $29 and $44 less per user per month than Freshdesk Omni’s plans.

What types of companies does Help Scout work best for?

Help Scout is ideal for businesses with 100-500 employees that are focused on developing long-term customer relationships.

• Software and ecommerce companies selling subscription products.

• Financial services, insurance, healthcare, and professional services companies where trust and personal relationships are key to client retention.

• Manufacturing and logistics teams managing complex workstreams where multiple companies may need to be involved in answering a single question.

• Property management and real estate companies where getting back to tenants and buyers quickly is critical to closing sales and renewing leases.

• Educational institutions (and the departments within them) that are struggling to manage huge volumes of requests from students, parents, and staff.

Help Scout is a great fit for these types of companies because it's not built solely for "deflecting tickets" like some competitive products. Instead, it's full of ways to help you keep everything organized, take on more volume, offer self-service opportunities to your customers, and automate the busy work away.

“I want to build tools for these people that are customer obsessed, just like we are.”

Jared McDaniel

Help Scout co-founder and former VP of product design on The Supportive Podcast (2025)

FAQs

Below, you'll find the answers to some other questions you might have about Help Scout.

Is Help Scout a customer support platform, a help desk, or a shared inbox?

Help Scout is all of those things and more. What it's called depends on who's describing it. Some people call it customer service software, some customer support software, and some a help desk, ticketing system, shared inbox tool, customer success platform, or customer communications management system.

Is Help Scout just for companies that support "customers," such as SaaS and ecommerce?

Help Scout does work well for SaaS and ecommerce companies, and we have lots of customers in both of those industries. However, it is also used by professional services, insurance, and financial services companies to support their clients; by educational institutions to support students, parents, and staff; by healthcare organizations to support patients; by property management companies to support tenants; and by manufacturing and logistics companies to manage requests from dealers, couriers, and internal teams.

You don't need to call the people you support "customers" to benefit from Help Scout. If your team is accountable for answering questions and managing requests from any group of people, Help Scout will help you collaborate on requests as a team, automate busywork so you can focus on things that need a personal touch, organize your work so nothing slips through the cracks, and get detailed reports that show how things are going and where you could improve.

How much does Help Scout cost?

Help Scout offers a free plan for up to five users.

All paid plans come with a 15-day free trial. There are three paid plans to choose from:

• Standard: $25/user per month, paid annually*

• Plus: $45/user per month, paid annually

• Pro: $75/user per month, paid annually

Envoy is billed based on AI agent usage. Customers can try it free for three months. After that, it costs $0.75/resolution (with discounts available for prepaid resolutions).

* Monthly pricing for Help Scout is also available. Get more details on our pricing page.

How difficult is it to migrate to Help Scout from another platform?

Most migrations are completed in a few hours at the shortest or a couple of days at the longest. You start by pointing your email addresses, social accounts, and business phone number at Help Scout. After that, messages will start flowing into your inbox. Most teams can do it without any help from IT.

If you're moving to Help Scout from another platform, you can also import your conversations, customer profiles, and tags automatically so you don’t lose your old data or have to start over from scratch. You can even run a sample import of 100 conversations to see how everything looks before the full move.

If you need help getting set up, live classes and email support are available to customers on all plans. Pro plan customers get a dedicated onboarding specialist, and Plus plan customers can get an onboarding specialist by purchasing an add-on.

Is Help Scout HIPAA compliant?

Yes, many Help Scout features can be configured to be HIPAA compliant, ensuring the secure processing and storage of electronic protected health information. 

HIPAA compliance is included in Help Scout's Pro plan.

When it comes to handling ePHI over channels like email, live chat, and in-app messaging, Help Scout is designed to support your compliance efforts in a number of ways:

• Business associate agreements (BAAs): Help Scout’s business associate agreement (BAA) is posted online, and we’ll sign one upon request.

• Data storage location: Help Scout is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a scalable, cloud-based computing platform with end-to-end security and built-in privacy features. AWS is HIPAA compliant, enabling covered entities subject to HIPAA to use their secure environment to process, maintain, and store protected health information.

• Uptime and data availability: We strive for 99.99% uptime across all of our products.

• User authentication: Help Scout supports two-factor authentication (2FA) access for Help Scout credentials or SSO through Google Apps. Certain plans have options for enabling authentication via any SAML-compatible identity provider.

• Data security: Help Scout's internal application communications (including notes, API calls, and live chat conversations) are encrypted over 256-bit SSL (secure sockets layer).

• Audits: Help Scout completes regular audits and annual risk assessments to ensure continued HIPAA compliance. This includes updating, reviewing, and testing our disaster recovery plan.

We also offer a customer portal that provides a secure, login-gated path that keeps sensitive information out of unencrypted emails.

Keep in mind that while the majority of Help Scout’s features can be configured to be HIPAA compliant, integrations between Help Scout and other platforms may not meet HIPAA standards. In addition, Help Scout’s knowledge base solution, Docs, isn’t considered to be compliant and should only be used for data that is not sensitive in nature.

For more information on HIPAA compliance and security at Help Scout, visit:

• Help Scout and HIPAA

• Help Scout’s privacy policy

• Help Scout’s security policy

How does Help Scout keep my data secure?

Help Scout is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, all communications are encrypted, and you can control access with detailed permissions.

All web application communications are encrypted over 256-bit SSL, and you can manage access via two-factor authentication (2FA), SSO, or any SAML-compatible identity provider.

Permissions and data controls let you limit what each user can see and do down to the inbox level. Data redaction in notifications reduces the risk of exposing names, addresses, and account numbers.

Help Scout monitors security and performance 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and can provide the latest SOC 2 Type 2 report upon request.

How can my team access Help Scout?

Help Scout can be accessed through its web app or its mobile apps for Android and iOS devices.