In our last post, we shared our four favorite Help Scout features. This week we’re looking at the things we found more challenging when we were setting up our test environment. Keep in mind that we’re most familiar with the Plus and Company tiers of Help Scout, both of which have the entire feature set. If you’re using the Standard tier, you’ll find that it doesn’t include Custom Fields, Teams, or Salesforce (and other features). See the Help Scout website for a full list of the features available in each tier.

If you’re new to the TestBox blog, we’ve been sharing features we love and those we’ve found more challenging in popular customer support platforms — and offering some workarounds to overcome their limitations. You can find some of the other posts in this series here:

Let’s get back to Help Scout and the things we struggled with.

1. No built-in SLAs

The first thing to note is that Help Scout has no built-in SLA feature — something we consider to be a necessity in any customer service organization. Instead, Help Scout suggests tracking the aging of conversations using a combination of different features to create an SLA-like experience.

We recommend:
We added tags to track conversations that had nearly reached an SLA threshold or had already crossed one so that we could easily identify them. This required setting up workflows for SLAs and setting the workflows to run in the appropriate order. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect solution, because workflows can only run once per conversation.

2. Limited automations for large organizations

While Help Scout’s automation system is quite versatile and can be used for many use cases, it quickly becomes difficult to manage for a large organization. Automatic workflows only run once per conversation (not per thread). This is a serious drawback when you consider that conversations can be revived by customers at any time.

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3. No email deflection

We added tags to track conversations that had nearly reached an SLA threshold or had already crossed one so that we could easily identify them. This required setting up workflows for SLAs and setting the workflows to run in the appropriate order. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect solution, because workflows can only run once per conversation.

In conclusion

We added tags to track conversations that had nearly reached an SLA threshold or had already crossed one so that we could easily identify them. This required setting up workflows for SLAs and setting the workflows to run in the appropriate order. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect solution, because workflows can only run once per conversation.

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