HelpScout vs. Groove
Which online help desk solution is right for you?
No one can deny that customer service has migrated to the online world. Customers are quick to take to email and social media with complaints, questions, and praise, and standard email systems are not the easiest way to manage these queries.
Apps Help Scout, Groove HQ, and Zendesk are add-ons to traditional email. They organize your emails in a way that's more applicable to customer service. All three will help you and your team organize, assign, and respond to customers more efficiently.
If a service like that sounds like just what your company needs, read on to decide which option caters to you best.
| Pros all Three | Cons all Three |
|---|---|
| Boost team productivity & collaboration | New system for employees to learn |
| Organize email in customer service friendly way | Must be used on top of existing email system |
| Keep track of customer queries and who is responsible for responding |
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|---|---|---|---|
| In Summary | Help desk program with personalized email customer experience, creates reports that offer actionable support metrics, API available with Standard package, free 15-day trial offered | Fully customizable and scalable help desk program, provides reports & metrics, open API, free 30-day trial offered. | Completely scalable customer service software with a robust suite of features to better serve customers, analytics & reports, open REST API, free 30-day trial offered, but no free plan available |
| Pros | Invisible to customers, many free integrations, reporting, organizes email in a way more conducive to customer service | Invisible to customers, customizability with integrations, simple pricing, reporting/metrics, grows with your business, helps to organize email in best way for customer service | Invisible to customers, 5 plan options are flexible and scalable, free 30-day trial, tons of apps and integrations, generate insightful analytics and reports, features for customer self-service |
| Cons | Limited features, price per user for Standard package, Docs are additional $20/month | Cost is per agent, most features must be added through integration | No free package, cost is per agent, some features only available with more expensive packages |
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| API | HTTPS API (available to Standard customers) | HTTP(S) API | REST API |
| Intergration | Help Scout Apps | Groove Extras (scroll down to view suite of extras) | Zendesk Apps & Integrations |
| Mobile App | Yes (iOS & Android App) | Yes, a mobile web app that can be accessed from any mobile device in your browser | Yes (iOS, Android, Windows, Kindle) |
| Pricing |
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| Options |
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| Support |
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Review of Help Scout
Help Scout’s focus on email means that your customers won’t even be able to tell that you’re using the help desk program. Overall, Help Scout is invisible to customers and easy for team members to set up and use. You can:
- set up customer profiles
- assign queries to specific team members
- add notes to other team members
- keep track of who has and hasn’t been replied to
Resources
The Help Scout approach is a holistic effort to help you and your team improve their customer support. This means that their resources page garners a lot of focus from the company. For you, this means you can gain access to e-books, guides, and online classes all aimed at helping you better serve your customers.
Pricing
Help Scout’s free forever plan is pretty generous, giving you 3 users and 1 mailbox. If you decide on the Standard plan, pricing is simple: $20 per user per month gets you unlimited everything—features, storage, integrations, and support. The biggest benefits here are:
- unlimited emails and storage
- access to reports and workflows
- API access
The Bottom Line
Bottom line, it’s worth it. If email is your bread & butter when it comes to support, Help Scout is the help desk for you. Whether you choose the Free or Standard plan, this help desk’s improvements over traditional email will seriously boost your support team’s accuracy and efficiency. Help Scout offers a free 15-day trial of Standard service—try it for yourself and decide!
Review of Groove HQ
Groove looks and feels just like ordinary email to your customers, and optional Knowledge Base creates a generic help page for your customers to take a look at before contacting your team. Groove simplifies and streamlines your customer support process with features like:
- assignment of support requests to specific team members
- private notes
- metrics and reports
- a suite of extras
Integrations
The biggest factors in Groove HQ are the integrations. The system is totally customizable. Groove itself provides a basic, help-desk platform, and you can integrate all of your other business apps with it. These integrations, which you pick and choose from, are what make the Groove system so powerful and relevant. As your business grows, Groove grows with you, allowing you to add additional features, including:
- a knowledge base (think FAQ articles)
- live chat
- customer satisfaction ratings
- Facebook & Twitter integration
Pricing
Groove pricing is simple—$15 per user per month gets you access to all of Groove’s features. They don’t offer a free package, but who wants limited access anyway?
The Bottom Line
If your business interacts with customers via social media, Groove HQ is definitely the way to go. Integration with Facebook and Twitter easily turns tweets and posts into customer support tickets on the Groove dashboard, allowing team members to view and respond to all requests in one convenient location. If you’re a small shop, you won’t be bogged down by countless features you don’t need. Simply add Groove apps as you need them. Groove offers a free 14-day trial, so take a look and see how it fits you!
Review of Zendesk
Zendesk takes all of your customer feedback and houses it under one, convenient roof. Agents can access emails, chats, phone calls, and tweets all through the same help desk interface. Team members can also collaborate and work together on cases. Some of Zendesk’s best features include:
- Multi-channel support
- Over 100 integrations
- Branded customer facing web interface
- Reports and analytics
Support
Zendesk offers great support to accompany their software. An extensive knowledge base, interactive community, and searchable database of help articles ensure that all of your product related questions are solved as timely as possible.
Pricing
Zendesk’s pricing allows you tons of options with 5 plans ranging from $5 - $159 per agent per month. They don’t offer a free plan, but you can get a 30-day free trial of Zendesk’s intermediate Plus package.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line, Zendesk is a great solution to streamlining and improving your customer service. Handling customer feedback from all variety of sources is absolutely key in today’s market, and Zendesk will allow you to do just that. With over 100 apps and integrations, Zendesk is as simple or robust as your needs and can easily scale with your business.
Some other solutions:
Desk.com
- Customer support platform that includes universal inbox, case management, self-service sites, productivity tools, customer profiles, reporting, multilingual, mobile, Salesforce
- free 14-day trial of Standard plan
- 3 plans ranging from $3/month - $50 per user/month
SharePoint
- Project management service that helps teams share ideas and collaborate across locations
- free 180-day trial
- 2 plans ranging from $3 - $7 per user/month
