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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

Funny because we (B2B SAAS company) literally built an in house tool to manage customers at a "Company" level rather than Contacts/Users. However we decided to switch to Helpscout as we didn't wanna self host and it has been a bad experience with helpscout. They have no concept of "Company" and we are honestly considering switching back to our home grown tool. There definitely is need for tool like this.

I will be happy to beta test if you are offering.

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HelpScout is a super competent team inbox solution, but yes - it's simply not designed for supporting an entire company.

We would love for you to beta test! You can kick the tires by signing up and inviting a few colleagues (ping us in support to see what it feels like), or I can walk you through a demo.

Thanks for replying. I will test it out and let you know. I would also encourage to really "disrupt" (Yes I used the word here) pricing for support tools. Per agent/user pricing (zendesk/freshdesk/helpscout etc) really adds up for a startup/smaller teams and I would encourage you to consider flat rate pricing with limits of different types.

I know what you mean. We're doing a few things in terms of pricing that (I think) are unusual for support tools:

- Unlimited read access to everyone at your company (because customer support conversations should be accessible to all team members). Say you have 15 people, but only 3 are customer-facing certified - if we charged $15/month, it would be $45/month for 15 people. (This also means unlimited write access in internal rooms - think of it as free Slack;)

- No charge for two customer-facing agents, which would cover most bootstrapped or pre-seed startups;

- Off-the-bat SSO; not a part of enterprise plan.

Nice. 1st and 3rd points are gold. I would say that for read only, at least allow internal team members to comment/note on customer issues and consider that read only as well. That way, we can have more team members be involved in internal notes etc for a customer but only charge if we are replying ? Or may be add role for agents as "commenter vs customer facing" . We ourselves offer SSO with our lower plans and that is very popular. The whole old school model of "SSO only available with Enterprise" needs to die soon.

Yes, totally agree on the SSO part.

The whole reader/writer part is pretty confusing. I made a brief video that explains a possible workflow: https://www.loom.com/share/7f644774c3114e65b779d13d1c6eda18

Front also rolled out support for "accounts" last year which sounds exactly like what you are trying to do. It aggregates a set of contacts under an account and lets you use accounts through the whole application.

You can see all of the communication from a company across all channels (support, sales, success), get automatically notified if someone else in the organization replied recently, do routing/classification based on account data (account size, account owners), and filter analytics by account.

Worth a look if you're considering going off Helpscout.

Just to clarify, you get this account-level view from the perspective of the vendor, correct?

(i.e. if I'm an end user and I use Front to get support from my vendor - will my colleagues be able to get involved in sorting through my issue?)

we’re B2C and whilst I love helpscout, they seem to have stopped innovating or caring about solving some pain points (in our case multi-language support). I can kinda understand most of the time, but some things just feel a bit too tight fisted to me… They still seem to be better than zendesk and intercom, but I really wish they would push the envelope a bit more…

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