Are you making the meow-st out of your Help Scout license?
Many support leaders love Help Scout — it’s beautifully designed, easy to use, reasonably priced, and their customer service is second to none. Help Scout’s native features cover almost everything the average support team needs to provide excellent service.
But there’s always room for a little more, and that’s why there’s a range of great Help Scout integrations available on the market.
These integrations are great for tasks that Help Scout can’t solve out of the box, and for covering all the additional things modern customer service teams need to thrive.
If you’re not taking advantage of any Help Scout integrations, chances are you’re missing out on some extra value your help desk is able to deliver.
You don’t want that. And we don’t want that for you.
So, let’s dive into some of the support folks’ favorite apps you can integrate with Help Scout to better equip your team and up your customer service game.
What are Help Scout integrations?
Help Scout integrations are tools that you can connect to your account to boost support agents’ productivity, automate manual tasks, and improve the customer experience you’re creating.
Help Scout offers a good number of native integrations, including 19 communication apps, 14 analytics tools, 8 CRM integrations, 6 support-specific solutions, and 5 e-commerce add-ons.
We talked to a bunch of support leaders in preparing this list, and most support teams use Help Scout integrations to handle the following tasks:
- Streamlining their quality assurance process with QA review tools connected directly to the service desk.
- Sending notifications to internal communication tools, like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
- Boosting productivity through AI-powered solutions that draft replies and send responses to customers
- Pulling data from social media platforms, cloud-based phone systems, and other support channels
- Optimizing data flow by pushing data from Help Scout to other apps.
- Improving KPIs like first contact resolution by pulling data from other tools into Help Scout, displaying all customer details alongside support inquiries.
Some integrations, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, are only available with the Help Scout Plus plan or higher. Others come with all Help Scout plans.
The best Help Scout integrations out there
With so many options on the market, it can be hard to determine which integrations generate real value and which are just fluff not worth looking at.
Good news: we’ve found the ones that are the real cat’s pajamas. The pick of the litter.
Here are six of the most useful Help Scout integrations. Put ‘em to use, and you’ll find they can supercharge your team and help you deliver an incredible experience for your customers.
- Klaus
- Zapier
- Shopify
- Slack
- Birdie
- SupportAgent
Top Help Scout integration: Klaus
It’s hard to imagine a high-performing support team without some kind of quality assurance platform or process. And if you’ve ever tried setting up quality assurance scorecards in a Google Sheet, you know how tedious and cumbersome that is.
The Klaus integration for Help Scout solves this problem.
It’s built specifically for customer service quality management, and it has all the advanced features you need to make the QA process efficient, transparent, and reliable.
By integrating Klaus with your Help Scout account, you’re able to:
- Instantly pull Help Scout conversations to Klaus.
- Pick conversations for review based on advanced filters, such as CSAT, complexity, sentiment, or use artificial intelligence to suggest controversial cases for review.
- Build custom QA scorecards with your specific quality standards in mind.
- Automatically assess support performance and get access to AI-generated insights with the AutoQA feature.
The Klaus integration is a must-have if you want to provide consistent and high-quality service and continuously improve your customer experience.
Nothing compared to Klaus’s power and frictionless experience. After a few minutes, I implemented the core product, mirrored our support rubric, and began experimenting with our IQS strategy. Immediate value! Fast forward a few months, and Klaus would go on to improve our CSAT by over 20% and our overall product knowledge and messaging alignment by 30%.
Top Help Scout integration: Zapier
If you find yourself wasting time looking up customer data in multiple tools or manually copying information from one app to another, Zapier may be the answer.
It allows you to connect Help Scout with (pretty much) any other tool from your tech stack, automating your workflows and saving precious time and resources.
And the best part is, you don’t even need any coding skills to set it up!
One of my favorite things that Zapier can help with is automatically moving customer inquiries to other tools and departments for necessary follow-up actions. Your support agents no longer have to manually create new tasks in Jira or notify the sales team about a hot lead. With Zapier workflows, you can do just that with simple actions like adding a single tag to a Help Scout conversation.
Here are a few more ideas on what you can achieve by integrating Help Scout with Zapier:
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. With the number of new apps added to Zapier regularly, and a dash of creativity, you can automate a huge range of manual support tasks.
Top Help Scout integration: Shopify
Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the planet, with a market share of over 25%. If you’re operating on Shopify, leveraging its integration with Help Scout can bring your support team’s efficiency to the next level.
It’s a simple and efficient widget in the mailbox sidebar with an overview of the customer history and recent orders. An absolute must-have for anyone aiming to provide a personal touch in customer service. And a quality of life improvement too!
The Help Scout x Shopify integration allows you to:
- Display key customer metrics and recent orders conveniently in your mailbox sidebar view.
- Quickly access order details
- Add a widget featuring your knowledge base articles to your store pages.
Top Help Scout integration: Slack
If Slack is your go-to communication tool, connecting Help Scout to your Slack workspace is a no-brainer. It allows you to receive Slack notifications whenever a new conversation pops up, or when you assign, update, or send a new message in an existing ticket.
Some of the most common Slack x HelpScout integration use cases include:
- Notifying a specific channel about tickets from strategic accounts to keep track of questions and problems that can impact client relationships and renewals.
- Sending notifications to loop in a non-support team member who doesn’t actively monitor the Help Scout mailbox daily.
- Posting notifications about new Help Scout tickets when there are specific conversation tags added. As an example, notifications for new conversations with #feature_request or #feedback tags can help bring visibility to your customer feedback.
Every time you have to manually notify someone about a Help Scout ticket, the Slack integration probably could take care of it for you.
Top Help Scout integration: Birdie
If you’re at a SaaS company, the Birdie app is what you need.
If you ever found yourself in the annoying back-and-forth situation of trying to understand what issue a user is facing, you’re not alone.
The good news is that Birdie can solve that problem once and for all.
When you need additional clarification of a reported issue, the Birdie integration lets you request a screen recording with a single mouse click directly in Help Scout. After that, your customers will be able to record their screen (along with the console logs) in a matter of seconds.
You gain a clear understanding of the steps taken and problems your customer is facing without taking up their exchanging numerous messages. And your users will never struggle trying to access the console logs again.
It’s a win-win, saving both agents’ and customers’ time. Once you integrate Birdie with Help Scout, you’ll never want to go back to the old-school troubleshooting process. Cobrowsing just doesn’t get any easier.
Top Help Scout integration: SupportAgent
With the rise of generative AI tools, this list wouldn’t be complete without the SupportAgent integration — an AI-powered tool for drafting support replies. Help Scout acquired the app in September 2023, and their team is focused on making the integration absolutely seamless.
SupportAgent runs on GPT-4 and can quickly generate draft responses for your team by leveraging information from previous tickets and existing Docs articles. Your human reps act as a filter, ensuring that customers never see AI-generated text that may not meet your standards — which is a concern with many other AI bots.
SupportAgent works wonders when most of your support tickets are relatively basic or repetitive questions. However, like other AI solutions available on the market, it may be less effective when complex or technical cases make up a lot of your support volume.
Many support leaders echo one another when talking about the SupportAgent integration: it’s powerful, but it takes a few weeks or months (depending on your ticket volume) to learn and become a helpful extension for your human agents.
To achieve optimal results, enable the integration and allow it some time to learn and train on your incoming tickets. It will only get better over time!
Hit your customer service goals with Help Scout integrations
Tools like Help Scout are irreplaceable for support teams. Agents live in them, all day, everyday. A great tool like Help Scout can boost your productivity by a ton, but it’s still not smart to assume your agents will be fine with the default functionality.
By investing in the right Help Scout integrations, you can reduce friction for your customers and empower your crew to provide great customer service.
So why not start right meow?
Request a demo today to see how Klaus can supercharge your support workflow, and integrate it with Help Scout to pinpoint the gaps and opportunities in your customer service.
