
Shared inbox, help center, and live chat for customer-first support teams
Help Scout is a customer support platform designed to help growing teams deliver outstanding service through a shared inbox, knowledge base, and live chat widget. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Help Scout operates as a fully remote company with over 250 employees across six continents, serving more than 12,000 businesses in over 140 countries. At its core, Help Scout replaces the complexity of traditional help desk software with a clean, conversation-based approach to customer communication. The shared inbox lets support teams manage email, social messages, and chat from a single unified workspace, with features like collision detection (so two agents never reply to the same customer simultaneously), internal notes for private team collaboration, and complete customer context displayed alongside every conversation. The built-in knowledge base tool, called Docs, enables teams to create self-service help centers that reduce support volume by letting customers find answers on their own. Help Scout's Beacon widget embeds directly into websites and web applications, giving customers instant access to knowledge base articles, live chat when agents are available, and AI-powered answers around the clock. The platform takes a human-centric approach to AI, offering conversation summarization, AI-assisted draft composition, and automated resolution of common questions without sacrificing the personal touch that builds lasting customer relationships. The platform is especially well-suited for small to mid-sized SaaS companies, e-commerce businesses, education institutions, and nonprofits that want a straightforward, affordable support tool without the bloat and complexity of enterprise help desk solutions. With workflow automation, saved replies, customer satisfaction surveys, and integrations with over 100 tools including Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, and Slack, Help Scout provides everything a support team needs to scale efficiently while keeping customers happy.
Manage email, social messages, and chat in a unified team inbox with collision detection, internal notes, and full customer conversation history.
Create public help centers and private internal documentation sites. Customers can search articles directly through the Beacon widget for self-service support.
Embeddable widget that provides live chat when agents are available, knowledge base search, and AI-powered answers 24/7. Uses expectation matching to only show chat when agents are online.
AI-powered chatbot that uses your knowledge base and website content to deliver instant, accurate answers to common customer questions without human intervention.
AI assistant that drafts reply suggestions in the compose window, summarizes long conversation threads, and helps agents respond faster while maintaining a personal tone.
Automate repetitive tasks with manual and automatic triggers including auto-tagging, assignment rules, round robin routing, and escalation workflows.
Manage product support tickets, bug reports, and feature requests through a shared inbox while providing self-service documentation through an integrated knowledge base.
Handle order inquiries, shipping updates, returns, and product questions with full customer purchase history visible alongside every conversation.
Get a professional customer support operation running quickly with the free plan, then scale to paid plans as the team and customer base grow.
Build a comprehensive help center that deflects common support questions, with AI-powered search and answers available 24/7 through the Beacon widget.
Best for small-to-mid-size teams (5-25 agents) who value clean design, fast onboarding, and human-centered support over configuration complexity.
Best for small-to-mid SaaS teams (2-25 agents) that value simplicity, personal customer relationships, and a fast path from zero to productive
Real-time visibility into which teammates are viewing or replying to a conversation, preventing duplicate responses and wasted effort.
See complete customer history including past emails, chats, social messages, and phone call notes in a sidebar alongside every conversation.
Create reusable response templates for common questions, with variables for personalization, accessible to the entire team.
Built-in reports covering team performance, response times, resolution rates, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and NPS surveys without additional setup.
Connect with 100+ tools including Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Slack, Zapier, and more through native integrations and a flexible API.
Send targeted messages to customers based on behavior, page views, or custom events directly within your app or website through the Beacon widget.
Enable distributed support teams to collaborate seamlessly on customer conversations with shared inboxes, internal notes, and real-time collision detection.

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