Creating positive customer experiences is at the heart of every business strategy; 80% of consumers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
For the past decade, Help Scout has been dedicated to helping companies build better customer relationships through their support teams. When a customer reaches out for help, it presents a crucial opportunity to deliver an excellent experience — or break a brand’s reputation.
But companies that want to deliver even more customer value go a step further and anticipate customers’ needs well before they have to ask for help.
Enter proactive support. Companies don’t want to be stuck purely reacting to customers; they need to be able to get ahead of common customer questions, highlight new offerings, and update customers on important news about their products or services. So we built Messages.
Today we’re excited to launch major updates to our Messages product.
With Messages, you can deliver proactive, targeted messages to current and future customers in your app or on your website. These improvements give growing businesses more complete customer communication options in one easy platform — alongside our shared inbox, live chat, and help center products.
Here’s how you can use Messages to connect with your customers.
Target customers with the right message at the right time
Messages now works alongside customer properties in Help Scout, allowing you to send messages to specific audiences based on the properties you already track. Events let you send messages at the right place and time based on conditions like time on page, specific page URL, last page viewed, and more.
Targeted messages allow you to personalize your outreach to fit specific customer needs:
We use events in Messages to target specific pages for each message and link directly to our Docs articles, allowing our users to get up to speed on our newest features as quickly as possible.”Cecile Franke
Support multiple teams’ objectives with flexible messaging options
The support team isn’t the only team thinking about how to provide customer value on your website or in your app. That’s why we built Messages to be flexible to fit many teams’ needs. Rich, engaging messages are easy to build, schedule, and send.
You can proactively start chats with customers or website visitors, offer links to help center Docs, time messages to coincide with important company announcements, and fill messages with links, bolded or italicized text, bulleted lists, images, and more to catch customers’ attention.
Messages is one of the key tools in our support toolkit. Different team members send messages based on specific needs, and we’ve used it for contextual onboarding, downtime or bug alerts, and to gather product feedback.”Kirsty Kearney-Greig
Track customer engagement to improve over time
Messages can help you learn more about what resonates with your customers. You can track views and engagement on single messages or make use of the brand new Messages dashboard to track usage, performance, and more, all in one place.
See all your messages; view basic reporting, monthly usage tracking, and overall engagement; or create a new message all from the same, easy-to-use screen, making managing Messages simple:
We use Messages on both our B2B and B2C sides of the business for Beta testing, support, and on our website. We appreciate the clear metrics and means to evaluate what is working most effectively.”Jess Vyvial-Larson
Only pay for what you use
Get started for free! Every Help Scout plan comes with 2,000 free message views per month. That means you can create as many different messages as you want and get them in front of 2,000 unique contacts.
Need more? Pricing starts at $20/month and scales based on your usage.
Many communication channels, one powerful platform
Get access to everything you need to support and delight your customers, all in one platform. Anticipate customers’ needs with Messages, provide self-help answers with Docs, manage email and live chat with shared inboxes, and optimize success over time with reports.
It’s the easiest, most intuitive, and best-value platform out there, with the fastest time to ROI (according to customer reviews on G2!).
To try out Messages and everything else Help Scout has to offer, start your free trial today.
