Intercom vs Help Scout: Complete Guide for Picking the Right Tool

Whether you have ten customers or a thousand, you must support your customers, solve their queries, and monitor their complaints in a timely manner. If handled seamlessly, customer engagement and retention will improve without a doubt.

However, if things go south… you will be here looking for new customer service software to help your agents throughout support operations.

If you are looking for the best customer service software, you must have come across two software heavyweights: Intercom vs Help Scout.

Both do exactly the same – optimize customer support operations in all ways possible. But which of them has the upper hand? Which platform meets your customer service needs in the long run?

This is THE article that will help you find the perfect customer support platform for your business.

What is Help Scout?

Having been in the game since 2011, Help Scout offers an email-style interface and multiple support-centric features for all sorts of use cases. It is one of the most easy-to-use customer service software you need in the early days of your brand.

Help Scout lets your agents handle all customer conversations in a single robust platform that feels just like their native inbox. They can respond to customer requests, monitor, troubleshoot and escalate them, and eventually, stay ahead of customers as your business expands.

Key Help Scout Features

Live Chat

Beacon is Help Scout’s live chat widget through which you can offer real-time support to your customers/visitors or recommend articles based on the page they are viewing. Moreover, Beacon lets you offer tailored customer experience via three modes: Self Service, Ask First, and Neutral.

Saved Replies

Help Scout lets you create and save responses (email and chat) to frequently asked queries (FAQ) and shoot them whenever necessary instead of repeatedly typing them. It saves time and nerves.

Traffic Cop

Traffic cop is a visual indicator that enables you to identify who is currently working on a conversation in real time. The feature has a built-in traffic agent that always closely monitors for duplicate replies.

Report Bundle

Help Scout provides multiple categories of reports: All Channels, Email, Chat, Phone, and Happiness. You can use these crucial metrics to evaluate average response time, first response time, and average resolution time to determine how happy or satisfied people are with your customer service.

HIPAA Compliance

Help Scout’s HIPAA compliance incorporates separating protected health information (PHI) from email notifications. Plus, it conducts yearly risk assessments, including reviewing PCI DSS requirements and updating and testing disaster recovery plans (DRP).

Best Suited For?

Help Scout is ideal for start-ups and small businesses that need a customer service platform to serve people on primary communication channels such as live chat and email. These companies primarily operate in e-commerce, manufacturing, real estate, and education sectors.

What is Intercom?

Intercom is a customer service platform that empowers brands to engage with customers via email, live chat, chatbots, and self-service options. The software has essential features to help support agents organize their workload and collaborate to effectively fix customer issues/queries.

The Intercom tool helps brands strengthen customer relationships withtailored, messenger-based experiences throughout customer journeys. Further, the tool comes with an AI-enabled inbox built to fulfill the needs of modern customer support teams.

Key Intercom Features

Mobile Carousels

Mobile carousels are customizable, no-code interfaces that let you predict touchpoints across product journeys where customers might need assistance. Accordingly, you can offer them support (live or automated) right from the message box.

AI Chatbot

Intercom’s AI-powered chatbot – Fin – is a natural language model built on the new GPT-4 technology. Apart from providing essential customer support, this bot understands customer queries and refines its responses to make them look relevant and natural. It take cues from the help center for these responses for better self-service.

Product Tours

From onboarding and signups to displaying new features, product tours are interactive guides that help your customers understand everything about your product/service. These multi-page tours require no code to set up and are highly customizable for better adoption.

Summarize

With this AI-powered feature, your support agents have to click the “Summarize” button to generate a detailed “too long, didn’t read” (TL;DR) of entire customer-facing conversations. No more sprinkled context.

Composer AI

Composer AI lets your support agents effortlessly change a message’s tone or rephrase it based on the type of customer query they are answering.

Best Suited For?

The Intercom tool is packed with advanced customer support features, making it an excellent choice for mid-to-large businesses. These functionalities favor financial services, retail, software, and e-commerce industries.

Direct Comparison: Intercom vs Help Scout

Let’s see how Help Scout and Intercom fare in various aspects.

Ease of Use

Help Scout

Help Scout’s interface mimics that of Gmail, which most of your support agents are aware of. Similar to Gmail, your agents can access all spam emails or draft responses from the left-hand-side menu.

All customer queries/issues are accessible from a single location, including customers’ names, ticket ID numbers, and the time elapsed. Moreover, you can even toggle between emails and chats with a single click.

While still being an obvious interface, other Help Scout’s functionalities can get trickier. For instance, according to one user:

“When we automate ticket emails, every time an email action happens on the ticket thread, the same email is repeatedly sent to all recipients, which causes duplicacy.”

Another Help Scout user has faced challenges while using the Docs feature, complaining, “There are always annoying and frustrating aspects around spacing, numbering, and bulleted lists in helpscout docs.”

Intercom

Instead of having one complete picture of an inbox or folder like Help Scout, Intercom provides a combined, sophisticated view. Put simply, you can see customer-facing conversations waiting alongside the content of a particular conversation.

The right sidebar flashes all of the data found in your Intercom account for that customer. That said, the operational side is where the Intercom tool shines. Several settings show up on a single screen with easily understandable descriptions and the ability to toggle on and off settings.

However, Intercom’s UI has frustrated multiple users, with one highlighting that “Multiple options and tabs are thrown around the screen when not necessary unless for very specific reasons.”

While Intercom offers hundreds of integrations, one of its users wished it improves “some of its integrations, especially with social media channels like Facebook, etc.”

Communication Channels

Help Scout

Help Scout lets you help customers via email, in-app messaging, and live chat. Moreover, it offers in-built integration with Facebook Messenger, but for other channels, such as SMS or WhatsApp, you will need to bring in a third-party tool.

Besides, Help Scout does not offer phone support, which can be a turnoff for some organizations.

Intercom

Intercom lets you serve your customers through a wider variety of channels such as live chat, email, Intercom Messenger, and 1:1 direct messaging. Its Calling feature (beta) enables you to voice/video-call customers from within its Messenger tool.

Besides, the Intercom tool offers natively built integrations for channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Plus, there are various third-party integrations to connect to other channels – Aircall (phone calls) or Google Meet (video calls) – that blend in well with Intercom Messenger.

Integration Versatility

Help Scout

While Help Scout offers integrations with many popular enterprise apps, chances are you could miss out on those you are exactly looking for, like WhatsApp. The customer service platform plays nicely with Slack, Jira, Hubspot, Zapier, and Salesforce. For instance, Zapier lets you integrate Help Scout with 50 business tools to streamline and automate your workflow, including SurveyMonkey, Wufoo, and Zengine.

Besides, you can build any tool of your choice using Help Scout’s API. Once you have developed the tool, it will test and add it to its marketplace.

Intercom

Intercom houses a massive library of integrations, both built by itself as well as by third parties. Their app store contains over 300 business tools; hence, you will likely find the one you use every day. These include Salesforce, Zapier, Jira for tickets, and Delighted Inc.

Further, Intercom enables you to develop your own tech stack, product, or application with its powerful APIs and webhooks. Just copy and paste the code on its visual builder to determine how your app would appear in the Inbox or Messenger.

Customer Support

Help Scout

You can contact Help Scout’s support staff via direct email, live chat, and the “Contact Us” pop-up at the bottom corner of the help center page. On their mobile app, you can use the Beacon icon or the question mark icon at the top of the screen. Their customer support agents are available 24/6.

Go for the higher-tiered plans if you want to have a dedicated account manager and quarterly training sessions. Besides, Help Scout provides a rich knowledge base where you can find articles on reporting, getting started, productivity, and integrations.

Intercom

Intercom offers support via direct email and live chat 24/7. Besides, you can join the community forum to:

• Ask questions and seek relevant answers
• Read tips from Intercom users and the technical team
• Share your ideas

Further, you can search articles on multiple topics in the help center, such as reporting, automation, and getting started.

Pricing

Help Scout

Help Scout’s pricing structure looks like:

• Standard: US$25/agent/month (billed monthly)
• Plus: US$50/ agent/month (billed monthly)
• Pro: US$65/agent/month

Help Scout offers a 20% discount on these subscriptions (except the Pro plan) if you opt for yearly billing.

The Standard plan comes with the features most brands need, including a live chat widget, automated workflows, custom reports, and in-app messaging (free for up to 2000 unique viewers of targeted messages).

However, as you expand, you will soon realize that you need more features like advanced API access, CRM integrations, and unlimited reporting history, which you can unlock in the Plus plan.

Furthermore, for big customer service teams, Help Scout’s Pro plan fits best, with features such as enterprise security, 50 free light users, and a dedicated account manager.

Intercom

Intercom offers its platform in three different packages:

• Starter: US$74/month (billed annually)
• Pro: Custom quote
• Premium: Custom quote

Intercom’s pricing is weaved with mysteries. Their Starter package, though, costs US$74/month (2 agents), offers limited features. You can unlock more powerful features on higher-tiered plans, for which you must schedule a demo call with Intercom.

What adds fuel to the fire is that you have to pay extra for the add-ons. For instance, the Product Tours and Surveys will cost at least $199/month and $49/month, respectively.

Intercom vs Help Scout: Who Wins?

On the one hand, Help Scout is user-friendly and affordable, but businesses will outgrow its available features and integrations sooner or later. Additionally, the lack of AI-based functionalities can hinder your growth as you expand.

On the other hand, Intercom provides dozens of powerful features from its basic plan itself, helping brands upscale their customer service operations.

However, the same advantage makes the platform’s interface clunky and difficult for users to find a specific feature. Moreover, Intercom’s pricey and unpredictable plans can be a real headache; those jaw-dropping bills can make you doubt your decision.

Help Scout takes the win if:

• You are a start-up or small-sized customer support team running on a budget
• You primarily handle customer-facing conversations via live chat and email
• You are a lean company that does not want to waste time on training sessions

Intercom hits the spot if:

• You are a mid-to-large company looking for game-changing AI capabilities
• You want to serve customers across multiple communication channels
• You do not want to miss out on critical support-centric features and integrations

Do you wish Help Scout could offer more features and Intercom was more affordable? Many businesses like yours have switched to Helpwise for its advanced capabilities, ease of use, and cost-effective plans.

Why Helpwise is a Better Alternative?

Budding customer support teams do not have deep pockets or hours of time to invest in deploying and learning a new tool. As such, they need something simple enough to get up and running fast, sophisticated enough to cover all the bases, and flexible enough to grow as they grow. Helpwise ticks all of these boxes.

Offering a super-intuitive interface, 50+ integrations, and a feature-packed platform, Helpwise empowers you to handle customer requests across all channels and provide clients with hyper-personalized yet high-impact resolutions.

Let’s see how we stand out in this Intercom vs Help Scout comparison.

Considering the number of features, Helpwise easily scores way more than Help Scout. For instance, Help Scout lacks voice support, while Helpwise provides Native Dialer to manage texts and calls. Additionally, you can unlock AI capabilities with Helpwise, including summarizing and paraphrasing, unlike Help Scout.

Further, Helpwise automatically assigns customer-facing conversations to support agents based on workload and round-robin. Help Scout is yet to have such a feature.

Worried whether these power-packed features take a toll on Helpwise’s UI? Do not, as navigating its interface is as easy as a cup of tea. Here are some testimonials:

• “Generally easy to use, and the rules are very helpful” – Jack Y., Website Coordinator.
• “Smooth integration with my favorite eCommerce tools like Shopify and Klaviyo.” – A verified user.

Besides, Helpwise’s packages go easy on your wallet. Starting at US$15/user/month, Helpwise tops out at US$50/user/month – billed monthly. Hilariously, Intercom’s basic subscription costs US$74/month (two users) itself. Not to mention, you have to splurge money on add-ons on top of that.

Similarly, you can save US$1800 annually by switching from Help Scout’s Pro plan to Helpwise’s Premium plan without sacrificing any important feature.

Clearly, you can save a lot by switching from Intercom to Helpwise – without compromising your customer service efficiency. For example, replacing Intercom’s mid-tier plan with Helpwise’s basic plan saves you US$4,680 every year (10 users).

A tabular breakdown of Intercom vs Help Scout comparison:

FAQs

Q. What are the differences between Help Scout and Intercom?

Help Scout offers an easy-to-use interface with essential customer support features. Intercom provides multiple advanced tools for top-notch customer service; hence, its UI becomes quite complex to use.

Intercom lets users provide customer support through multiple channels, including social media, voice chat, email, and in-app messaging. Help Scout offers limited support channels in the form of email and live chat.

Help Scout’s pricing is transparent, with price points ranging from US$20-65/user/month. Intercom’s pricing is a bit deceptive. While the basic plan costs US$79 per month and includes two agents, you must contact their sales team for the higher-end plans to get a custom quote.

Q. Which one is better for customer support: Help Scout or Intercom?

If you are a start-up or a growing business looking for simple, cost-effective customer support software to manage customer requests mostly through email and live chat, Help Scout is a better choice.

On the flip side, if you are already a big name in your industry and are looking for a customer service platform with advanced AI and reporting capabilities, better go with the Intercom tool.

However, Helpwise offers the best of both worlds. Our customer support platform has advanced in-built features to help you serve clients better. Moreover, you can unlock most of these functionalities in our basic plan itself.

Q. How do Help Scout and Intercom compare in terms of pricing?

Help Scout’s plans start at US$20/agent/month all the way up to US$65/agent/month. Intercom’s basic plans cost US$ 74/month (two users). For higher-tiered plans, you need to reach out to them for custom quotes.

Q. What features does Help Scout offer that Intercom does not?

On the contrary, the Intercom tool outshines Help Scout when it comes to offering features. The features Intercom provides that are not available in Help Scout plans include social media integration, assignment rules, advanced reporting, and AI-based functionalities.

Q. Can Help Scout and Intercom be integrated with other software?

Yes, both Help Scout and Intercom offer integrations with multiple business tools. While Help Scout ties up easily with Jira, Salesforce, and Zapier, Intercom does the same with Hubspot, Jira for tickets, and Slack. However, Help Scout’s limited integrations can hamper agents’ productivity as businesses scale up. Likewise, Intercom’s users have reported issues while integrating their go-to tools with its platform.

Thankfully, Helpwise eliminate both these issues by offering deep integrations with multiple popular business apps.