Missive - Help Scout's alternative for collaborative customer service teams.
If you're looking for the best Help Scout alternative for customer service, you're in the right place. Help Scout and Missive are products tackling a similar issue, they are email management software to help customer support teams. But these two apps have very different approaches to what it means to collaborate around support inquiries.
The most significant difference with Help Scout is Missive's collaborative nature; it was built from the ground up with team-work in mind.
Help Scout focuses mostly around sharing but not collaborating around conversations.
On the other hand, Missive is a complete solution that lets you handle all of your company's communications (both internal and external). Missive grows with your business and easily adapts to its dynamic structure.
Ten reasons why companies use Missive vs Help Scout
We found ten reasons why you might consider Missive to be a better alternative to Help Scout.
1. Assign conversations to more than one coworker or a specific team.
In Missive, every conversation can be assigned to a whole team, a specific person, or multiple people. In Help Scout, you can only assign an email to one person or whole team at a time.
Help Scout's Most Helpful Critical Review on G2.comEven more useful, in Missive, you can activate the Team Inbox flow for shared inboxes (e.g., help@acme.com). This will let your team triage the conversations from a dedicated inbox. This resembles more to a real-life collaboration scenario, where a team can share the caseload.
2. You can manage many communication channels, not just email.
A business communication tool cannot be limited to just email. Customers, clients, and stakeholders nowadays communicate in a diverse array of channels. Not being able to concentrate many of them in a single app can lead to lousy customer experiences.
With Missive you can collaborate around these mediums:
- Email (free plan available, unlike in Help Scout)
- Live Chat (free up to 200 active chats per month, unlike in Help Scout)
- SMS
- Facebook Messenger (free, unlike in Help Scout)
- Instagram (not offered by Help Scout)
If one day someone sends you an email and the next they use WhatsApp, you can give them a proper follow-up from a single app.
3. Use Missive in a native Mac or Windows app.
Unlike Help Scout, we offer a native app available for Mac and Windows. Missive is also available on mobile for iOS and Android. You can also access Missive through a web browser, like Chrome or Safari. Every single feature is available on all platforms.
You will undoubtedly enjoy our multi-swiping feature. It lets you apply actions to multiple conversations at the same time with a one-finger swipe.
4. Automation offers fine-grained control.
Missive offers Rules, which are programmable conditions that help you automate your team's workflow for incoming/outgoing messages, and user actions as well. Unlike Help Scout, which applies rules to all emails the same. It also doesn't work on other channels of communication.
With Missive Rules, you can, for example:
- Apply labels upon reception to properly categorize conversations.
- Assign emails to specific team members based on the content of the email.
- Incorporate an SLA program to ensure an excellent customer experience.
- Snooze emails that arrive outside of business hours to help you achieve a better work/life balance.
- Share a message upon a label change.
5. Internal communication spaces.
Missive offers a complete internal chatting solution for your team. You can discuss ideas in a company-wide room, specific teams, or a one-on-one space.
Like other channels in Missive, you can add tasks in the chat, including conversation links, attach media, etc.
You can also create a private space for to-do lists, notes, or to keep links and docs handy.
This is currently impossible in Help Scout.
6. You can chat inside emails, not just add notes.
With Help Scout you can add notes to conversations. You can also tag coworkers to read your notes. But given the format they use to present the comments, it's hard to keep the notes relevant as the conversation evolves.
In Missive the comments are always intertwined with emails, as they arrive. Always to keep the context of the conversation.
7. Missive's Live Chat is actually collaborative.
In Missive, you can easily pass the baton to another teammate or send it back to the Team Inbox. In Help Scout you cannot unassign a chat, nor can people other than the assignee respond to the customer. Good luck trying to cover for a buddy!
8. Live collaborative drafts for real collision detection.
Think of Google Docs for email. Compose emails together, get feedback in real-time. Unlike with Help Scout where you only see when someone is viewing an email, but not the content of the message per se.
9. You can apply private or shared labels (tags).
In Missive you can create shared labels (or tags) to quickly arrange conversations for yourself, the organization, teams, or specific people. On the other hand, Help Scout only allows organization-wide labels.
10. You can create and assign tasks.
In Missive you can create to-do and assign them to coworkers, this helps the whole team manage simple communications-based projects with ease.
This is impossible to do in Help Scout, unless you add a third-party integration.
Pricing
The monthly investment for using Missive is substantially lower. Our top tier plan is 42% more affordable than Help Scout's.
Fair play
We like to be fair, so we have also listed three features that Help Scout has that Missive doesn't:
- Analytics: Evaluate your team’s volume by channel, busiest hours, and trending topics.
- Knowledgebase: You can create and publish answers for customers.
- In-app messaging: Send marketing messages to customers inside your website.
In the end, you decide which app fits best with your workflow. We hope this comparison will help you make up your mind with more ease.
In case you need more convincing, read what they have to say.
We are pioneers in the collaborative team email space.
NoteIf Help Scout gets an update and this article becomes outdated, email us and we will update it.
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