Help Scout vs Gmail

We use Help Scout for sales, customer support, admin, receipts (e.g. we forward all of our receipts into an inbox), invoicing, and even recruitment. We've been using Help Scout for over 5 years and we love it!

Help Scout can be best described as a customer-centric tool. They have done an incredible job at building somewhat of a community around their software. For example, when I see a company is using Help Scout (on either the website chat or email response), I have an immediate reaction of feeling that they care deeply about customer support and will have equally caring support reps.

I'm also part of their "Support Driven" Slack community as well and am regularly seeing teams of all sizes (big and small) actually switching over to Help Scout from Zendesk, Intercom, and Front, amongst others.

They have a nice implementation of live chat in their product, as it's actually thoughtful (and further customer-focused). How you might ask? Expectations matching. For one, you have to mindfully to mark yourself as "available", and if you aren't actively in Help Scout for a long enough period of time, it will automatically mark you as "away" (wait that's a feature...? hold on, let me explain).

There's nothing worse than having a "live chat" on your website that gives the impression that you'll get an immediate response, but in reality, you just get a bot that asks for your email address because "the team is away". It's a bad expectation mismatch. Help Scout doesn't allow this to happen.

They have more of an "email first" approach, with a "we might be live though" as a secondary. So when the live chat shows on your website, you can be sure that there's actually a human on the other end. Great expectation matching, which as a small team, I appreciate a lot. Now take that, versus Intercom, which simply upon seeing the logo, you and everyone else expects to speak to someone immediately, and if you aren't on the other end, they get frustrated - you're set up to lose versus surprise and delight (which is what Help Scout constantly allows for). If you're a small or mid-size team, why not set yourself up for success and delight out of the box?

One of the areas that got me obsessed with Help Scout many years back was their robust workflows functionality. You can set up either automatic or manual workflows. Automatic is great when you can set up some type of consistent trigger, like when a due date is today and the conversation is active or pending, then mark it active, set the priority custom field to P1, and add the tag "due":

Pair this with the API and you can trigger some pretty powerful workflows both inside and outside of Help Scout.

Help Scout has gone a human-centric approach to AI (unsurprisingly, as it's true to brand). What they've done is things like, automatic summarization of chat threads. So if you're jumping in and out of threads and collaborating with team members on a daily basis, it'll help you get back up to speed, without having to read the entire conversation thread:

We for one appreciate how Help Scout has handled their approach to AI, as when comparing Help Scout to Intercom for example, Intercom tries to rope in AI at every corner, in chat, and trying to automate conversation threads. While this is cool in theory, it does feel a bit like we're back in the "you must first talk to a bot before talking to a human" time period, which still is a bit frustrating. I'm sure Help Scout will do more in this area as AI continues to evolve in time.

Help Scout also has some pretty cool AI assist features coming to the actual compose window, pulling the likes of ChatGPT directly where you're actually responding to messages:

The thing is, the app is a bit buggy from time to time. You can accomplish most of what you'd like to do on-the-go, the thing is, it's missing some core features like the "workflows" functionality. This means, if you rely heavily on workflows when using Help Scout, you're going to be a bit frustrated when on mobile. I'll admit, I've definitely visited the desktop app on my phone every now-and-again to run a quick workflow 😅

On the plus side, the have an iOS and Android app, and both have similar feature-parity. It really just needs that final 20% added to the mobile app to make it great.

Gmail is one of the most widely used email providers in the world and the default choice for most individuals and businesses. We've used it for over a decade. In fact, we solely recommend teams use Google Workspace as the core foundation for their entire business software stack.

There is a fundamental issue with Gmail though. The actual email client that businesses use is the exact same one that was built for personal accounts (I'm sure you have one). So Gmail optimizes for the average user out of billions, not for focused teams who are running businesses.

So why use Gmail? Because it connects to almost everything (how often do you see "login with Google"?), and has one of the largest ecosystems of third-party tools available. That combination actually makes it the best email and calendar foundation for your business.

And note the word "foundation", because from there you can layer a better email client on top, like Superhuman email. That's what we do, because Gmail alone will never be what someone who gets more than 30 emails per week actually needs.

• Incredible email and calendar foundation
• Extensive third-party integrations
• Reliable and widely supported
• Strong mobile app experience

• Visually cluttered interface (chat, meet, sidebars, colors, pop-ups)
• Slower load times compared to modern email clients
• Built for the masses, not optimized for deep work
• Labels and triage system clutter the sidebar

Since Gmail is a part of Google, it works seamlessly with their entire ecosystem. You can jump from an email into a Google Doc, attach files from Drive instantly, launch a Meet call, or collaborate in Sheets without leaving the platform.

For teams already using Google Workspace, this integration is extremely powerful.

Gmail now has Gemini fully embedded into helping you write emails. You can now use their "Help Me Write" feature, and it will analyze previous emails to draft a reply in your tone.

Gmail also uses Gemini to help you search your inbox. Instead of typing keywords and hoping you remember the exact phrase from an email, you can ask it a normal question like, "When did I last speak to Sarah about the proposal?" or "Did the client ever approve the contract?" It will scan your inbox, give you a direct answer, and show you the emails it pulled that information from. That part is genuinely helpful, especially if you handle a lot of conversations and forget details.

The Gmail mobile app has a significantly better experience than even the web app in many ways. It's easy to navigate, loads relatively quickly, and is an overall good experience. They let you set swipe actions (Archive/Snooze/Delete) and get quite granular on the notification settings as well.

Although you'll run into some limitations using the Gmail app that will slow down your workflow. For instance, you cannot create hyperlink when composing an email within the app.

Google Workspace includes Gmail and the full suite of collaboration tools, and pricing varies by plan and billing cycle. Most business plans start around:

• Business Starter: ~$7/user/month
• Business Standard: ~$14/user/month
• Business Plus: ~$22/user/month