Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The Pitch

Help Scout's shared email aims for better customer service

By Mass High Tech staff

Help Scout (Part of Brightwurks Inc.)
Headquarters: Franklin, Tenn., moving back to Boston this summer
Email: nick.francis@brightwurks.com
Year founded: 2011
Employees: 3
The pitch: Open to investor partnerships
Phone: 615-261-8547
URL: www.helpscout.net

In the company’s own words: “Help Scout enables any team of two or more people to share an email inbox, ensuring everyone stays on the same page and no emails slip through the cracks. While email is more of a personal communication tool, Help Scout is built for teams. You can collaborate in real time, add private notes to conversations and assign them to various members of your team. The best use case for Help Scout is providing customer service or support. As your team and business grows, traditional email becomes unmanageable. Yet most businesses don’t need a complicated help desk, which is more focused on self-service support and automation. Help Scout gives your business the personal touch of email, with the organization and scalability of a help desk.”

People behind the company: Nick Francis, chief executive officer; Denny Swindle, chief technology officer; Jared McDaniel, chief creative officer. “We’ve been together for six years and built a successful design business together (Project83.com). This is our first real startup,” said Francis.

Background: Help Scout recently completed the TechStars program in Boston. In their Nashville-based design company, also under the BrightWurks umbrella, the founders designed websites and provided services such as usability testing. They built an RSS-to-email product called Feed My InBox, and had the idea of a shared inbox in mind for several years. Help Scout can be used to manage any catch-all email address — sales, billing, press, etc. — according to Francis. Any time you need to share an inbox with your team, Help Scout provides a way to stay in the loop and make sure every inquiry gets answered, he said.

The technology: Users sign up for Help Scout through the company website. “You still host your email anywhere you want, and forward a copy to Help Scout. It really is a simple forwarder,” said Francis. The company is adding capabilities, such as ways to make communications more contextual by drawing a customer’s history or profile from public sources into an email-based exchange. Francis said that while customer service is a focus right now, he sees other applications for the shared inbox concept.

The market need: Every company that does business on the web has a catchall mailbox. It could be a press inbox, “contact us,” or customer support. “Emails come in but there is no great way to manage them as a team. There isn’t a great way to keep everyone in the loop,” said Francis, noting that common problems include two people responding to a single email with different answers, with the second not knowing that the first had already responded. With Help Scout, other team members not only see that a response was sent but how a query was resolved and whether additional action is needed. Francis said Help Scout signed up 350 customer companies in the first 10 weeks on the market.

The pitch: “We are about to close $400,000 after finishing the TechStars Boston program, but we are still open to interesting investor partnerships for another 60 days or so,” said Francis. He said the ideal partners would be companies that already market to or serve small and midsize businesses. In addition, once the company comes to Boston, they would consider renting desks from an established startup.