Help Scout

Help Scout (legally Help Scout PBC) develops subscription-based help desk and knowledge base software used by customer support teams. Its core product works like a shared email inbox, letting teams manage customer conversations collaboratively, with supporting features such as workflows, saved replies, snooze, send later, multiple inboxes, custom views, customer and company profiles, SLA policies, and reporting on volume, response time and team performance. Alongside the inbox, the company sells Docs, a self-service knowledge base that customers can build and brand without code, and Beacon, an embeddable widget that surfaces help articles, live chat and contact forms on a website or inside an app.

The platform handles channels beyond email, including live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, with phone/voice available through integrations, plus over 100 integrations with third-party tools spanning CRM, ecommerce, analytics and marketing. AI capabilities include AI Assist for editing and translating replies, AI Summarize for recapping threads, AI Drafts for generating first replies, and AI Answers, an autonomous chatbot that answers customer questions from a company's help content. The company also offers proactive in-app Messages for onboarding, NPS and survey collection, and product announcements.

Help Scout describes itself as a global remote company; it transitioned to fully remote operations in 2020, with employees spread across more than 80 cities. Its products are documented through a public support site and a product changelog that tracks releases such as a secure customer portal, Twilio-based two-way SMS, per-inbox office hours, out-of-office reassignment, SLA-driven workflows and next response time goals.

Founding story

The company was founded on April 17, 2011 by Nick Francis, Jared McDaniel and Denny Swindle as a pivot from Brightwurks, a web design and consultancy firm the three had previously founded. Help Scout was publicly launched while the founders participated in the Techstars Boston accelerator program.

Business model

Help Scout sells its software as a per-seat SaaS subscription with monthly and annual billing, layered with usage-based pricing for AI resolutions and add-on charges for extra inboxes and knowledge base sites.

Published plans are Standard at $25 per user per month, Plus at $45 per user per month and Pro at $75 per user per month, with roughly 16% savings on annual billing and a free plan covering up to 5 users, one Inbox and one Docs site. The AI Answers chatbot is an add-on priced at $0.75 per resolution with pre-paid discounts and a three-month free trial. Additional inboxes cost $10 per month and additional Docs sites $20 per month. Higher tiers add advanced workflows, additional SLA policies, SSO/SAML, HIPAA compliance, light users, dedicated onboarding and a strategic account manager.

Traction

Public materials cite more than 12,000 companies using Help Scout and, separately, over 10,000 customers in more than 140 countries, with 80% customer retention past four years; the company reports teams respond to 56% more messages in their first year and that AI agents resolve 73% of interactions on average. Employee headcount is listed as 100 by Wikipedia and as 201-1000 on investor job boards.

Latest developments

Recent product updates include a secure Customer Portal for Plus and Pro plans letting selected company contacts view shared support history via six-digit code sign-in, two-way SMS through a customer-supplied Twilio number, per-inbox office hours, availability statuses synced across web and mobile, automatic reassignment of conversations when a teammate is away, SLA-triggered workflows and SLA-based views, Next Response Time goals included in SLA reporting, a Company Profile view aggregating account-level support metrics, and expanded conditions for building conversation views.