Maybe use Plain
When I wrote about Help Scout, much of my praise was appositional. They were the one tool I saw that did not aggressively shoehorn you into using them as a CRM to the detriment of the core product itself. This is still true. They launched a redesign that I personally don't love, but purely on subjective grounds. And there's still a fairly reasonable option for — and I mean this in a non-derogatory way — baby's first support system.
I will call out also: if you want something even simpler, Jelly, which is an app that leans fully into the shared inbox side of things. It is less featureful than Help Scout, but with a better design and lower price point. If I was starting a new app today, this is what I would reach for first.
But nowadays I use Plain. Plain will not solve all of your problems overnight. It's only a marginally more expensive product — $35 per user per month compared to Help Scout's $25 per user per month. The built-in Linear integration is worth its weight in gold if you're already using Linear, and its customer cards (the equivalent of Help Scout's sidebar widgets) are marginally more ergonomic to work with. The biggest downside that we've had thus far is reliability — less in a cosmic or existential sense and more that Plain has had a disquieting number of small-potatoes incidents over the past three to six months.
My personal flowchart for what service to use in this genre is something like:
- Start with Jelly.
- If I need something more than that, see if anyone else on the team has specific experience that they care a lot about, because half the game here is in muscle memory rather than functionality.
- If not, use Plain.
But the biggest thing to do is take the tooling and gravity of support seriously as early as you can.