We Switched from Zendesk to Help Scout, Here's Why

We are working day in day out improving our software. When we then run into a tool that adheres to our beauty standards, we tend to get a tick more excited than your average user. That’s what happened when we switched our help desk tool from Zendesk to Help Scout last month.

You might have noticed the switch if you’ve been in contact with our support in the past weeks. Or maybe you didn't even notice you were in support contact at all, which is one of the reasons we think Help Scout is so great.

We’d like to explain why we made the switch.

Help Scout became a serious blink on our radar thanks to one of our customers, Sebastian from Servershop24 . He stressed the benefits during an interview for a case study on the Userlike – Help Scout integration .

He also directed our attention to Help Scout’s Customer Loyalty blog , which is hands down one of the best blogs on customer support and general business around. One of the few which’ email updates I haven’t unsubscribed from.

Their blog ensured they were top-of-mind when we started thinking about alternatives for Zendesk. We made the decision to switch based on a few points:

Reporting – We wanted to measure our service performance more closely and found that Help Scout offered reporting capabilities in every plan, making things easy for a steadily increasing support team. Help Scout is just simple: all plans are nearly identical in features, you pay for the difference in operator seats. We can now track the performance of our support team more easily and use filter options for additional insights. What was disturbing at Zendesk was that the statistic options were rising with each plan, whereas at HelpScout you get the full package right away.

Multi language – Another feature that is included in all of Help Scout's plans. As a German company with global aspirations, we offer service in English and German.

Invisibility – This wasn’t a main reason for us to switch, but we really like it now that we did. Unless you choose for one of its higher products, your support emails will be stylized with the Zendesk theme. Help Scout takes pride in being the ‘invisible help desk’, and it’s true: to a customer a Help Scout powered email looks just like a regular email.

Simplicity – This comes back in all previous points. All of Help Scout’s products include all features. The price difference is only based on your number of operators. It doesn’t take a lot of weighing to find the right plan, and your account easily expands or shrinks according to your needs. Also, the whole thing just feels intuitive.

Easy switch – Finally, the switch to Help Scout is super easy. You can simply import all your helpdesk articles, macros, and old conversations, tags included. Once we heard that, the switch was easy.

Of course we’ve had a good run with Zendesk and it’s a widespread solution for good reasons: the analytics and reporting offered by their high-end plans can be very useful. For smaller teams that like to keep things more simple, however, Help Scout is in our opinion the best choice.

Help Scout conquered a spot in our business tool hall of fame, alongside all-time favorites like Asana, Slack and GitHub. Welcome!