Last Updated on November 23, 2010 by New-Startups Team
Help Scout, brought to you by Brightwurks, is a tool to make customer service performance for teams much easier. Inspired by a practical problem that a lot of business encounters, successful email response to customer service inquiries, Help Scout is a way to make providing customer service – externally more efficient, and internally more organized. This web app is an email client for teams that provide service and/or support through a single email address.
If a single email address is used to house every customer service request, there is bound to be overlap, miscommunications, and possibly incorrect service reporting. Problems such as a customer being responded to twice by two different individuals, missed emails due to improper delegation of reply or mis-marked statuses will happen and having a tool to minimize the possibilities of these problems is essential.
There in lies, the solution, an email tracking system specifically for team customer service functions, Help Scout. Focused on specifically email for teams, and not other forms of customer service response, Help Scout hopes to do one thing really well and not compete on the broader scales that their competition may offer (Zendesk, Tender, and Kayako). By filling a specific niche, Help Scout will be able to focus on making one aspect the best possible operation and maximize the potential of email team customer service processes.
By also making a web app that is simpler to learn and implement, Help Scout will win a huge battle. With most other web app providers, the interface and structure can be confusing and daunting. Help Scout wants to have themselves implemented in five minutes or less, with nothing to install and no difficult integration procedures other then setting up an email forwarder.
By focusing on a specific aspect of customer service and making the process simpler, Help Scout will be the best tool for email customer service response in team environments.
You can read more about the progress of Help Scout here: http://www.brightwurks.com/blog/category/b-combinator/