HelpCrunch Review, Pricing & Features
What is HelpCrunch?
HelpCrunch is a modern and powerful customer communication platform. With email campaigns, website pop-ups, and a knowledge base, it’s a full-featured customer support tool that we highly recommend.
Table of Contents
- What is HelpCrunch?
- HelpCrunch Review Summary
- HelpCrunch Pricing & Cost
- HelpCrunch Features
- HelpCrunch Customer Support
- HelpCrunch vs. Competitors
- Is HelpCrunch Right For You?
HelpCrunch Review Summary
HelpCrunch is a multi-channel messaging software company that was founded in 2016 by Pavel Pavlenko and Valery Kurilov. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and currently has 20 employees.
HelpCrunch includes features like live chat, email marketing, website popups, and a knowledge base to support customer communication and marketing outreach. The HelpCrunch inbox can be programmed to house both emails and chat conversations. Compared with other live chat tools, HelpCrunch is full-featured and can be used both for customer support and marketing.
There are two plans for customers to choose from: the Live Chat plan, which includes chat features and website popups starting at $15 per agent per month, and the Live Chat & Email plan, which combines chat and email marketing tools starting at $29 per agent per month. Annual plans are offered at a 20% discount from the monthly price.
Overall, HelpCrunch is a powerful solution that would benefit organizations looking to streamline customer support and marketing tools. It’s powerful and works very well, but given the price, it would likely prove costly unless your team has fewer than five agents. There are alternatives that are also worth consideration if you’re looking for cheaper options:
HelpCrunch Pricing & Cost
HelpCrunch pricing ranges from $15 to $49 per month. Customers can sign up for a chat-only plan or a plan that combines live chat and email services. If you sign up for a yearly subscription, you will save about 20% on the month-to-month price.
Live Chat
- Standard: $15 per agent per month; includes three popups and one chat widget
- Premium: $25 per agent per month; includes unlimited popups and advanced customizations
- Enterprise: Contact HelpCrunch for a custom plan
Chat and Email
- Standard: $29 per agent per month; includes 1,000 emails per team member
- Premium: $49 per agent per month; includes 10,000 emails per team member
- Enterprise: Contact HelpCrunch for a custom plan
HelpCrunch Key Features
This review will walk through HelpCrunch’s major features and their notable benefits or drawbacks. We’ll recommend which types of teams or organizations HelpCrunch would benefit most. Screenshots of the software will be included to give you a sense of the interface.
To learn more about how we research and rate software tools, read about SoftwarePundit’s review methodology.
Live Chat
Live chat software is used by a wide variety of organizations to connect with website visitors, answer questions, and provide real-time support. HelpCrunch offers a versatile, well-designed live chat feature that’s both detailed and easy to use. All core live chat features are included, like visitor typing previews and saved responses.
Inbox
The HelpCrunch inbox houses chat conversations, emails, and visitor information. Overall, this inbox is set up intuitively and has some unique aspects, like being able to create new inboxes with select agents, tags, and chat statuses. The inbox view is shown below:
Actions that can be completed in the inbox are:
- Mark chat as new, open, pending, on hold, or closed
- Assign tags to conversations
- Write notes for yourself
- Enter additional user information
- Send files, Knowledge Base articles, emojis, images, or canned responses
- Email chat transcripts to self and visitor
Widget
Website visitors will use the chat widget, which will be located on your website, to interact with customer support agents. This widget is highly customizable, with customizations ranging from widget color to display rules. One particular benefit to the HelpCrunch widget is that when first using the widget, visitors can either start a chat with an agent or immediately search the Knowledge Base for articles. A minor flaw in the widget, however, is that it takes a bit longer to load on webpages than widgets from competitors.
Visitors will have the ability to send files or emojis through the widget. They will also be notified when a message is seen and when an agent is typing a response.
Automated & Manual Messages
HelpCrunch includes marketing campaigns, which are either automated and manual messages, through email and the chat widget. These messages are sent to specific visitors for specific purposes — for example, you can craft a chat message that gets sent to visitors who have items in their cart but haven’t completed the purchase. Alternatively, you can create a scheduled email campaign that’s sent every Friday to announce your company’s weekly sale. HelpCrunch’s message builder is easy to use and detailed.
When building these messages, you’ll write the title, craft the message content, and set rules, which dictate the criteria required for the message to be sent. These rules, which can be extremely detailed, are shown below:
Message Performance
Each message will include a section with comprehensive metrics to help you understand how each message campaign performed. These metrics include the number of sent, opened, clicked, and replied-to messages. This section is of particular importance for those who wish to understand and improve visitor engagement and marketing efforts.
Knowledge Base
A knowledge base is a hosted webpage that contains frequently asked questions regarding a company’s policies, information, and more. The HelpCrunch Knowledge Base is more customizable than most alternatives and is easy to use. HelpCrunch customers will write articles and assign them to specific categories from within the HelpCrunch dashboard.
The searchable Knowledge Base will include the widget, where visitors can directly chat agents if they have further questions. Visitors can also rate articles as good, average, or bad, which will give your company a sense of whether the articles are helpful.
Popups
Popups are small windows that appear on a webpage to engage visitors. Popups often notify visitors of promotions or special happenings and include a call to action, like a “Sign Up For Our Newsletter” button. HelpCrunch’s popups are easy to build and are widely customizable. A view of the popup builder is shown below:
With the customization options, you’ll be able to alter:
- Popup text and content
- Button text, color, and URL
- Popup position (left, center of screen, right, etc)
- Animation (slide in, fade in, etc)
- Custom CSS code
- Display rules
Overall, this tool is helpful and easy to use. It is also not found in every competitor, so it stands out for marketing purposes.
Reports
The reports section within HelpCrunch provides metrics on chat, email, and Knowledge Base performance. While the chat and email sections provide some helpful information, like chat satisfaction reports, the included data is not nearly as comprehensive as the reports section in other tools like LiveChat. The Satisfaction Report provides a graph of closed chats and the number of chats that are rated great, average, or poor.
The Knowledge Base metrics within the reports tab are particularly useful because it includes metrics on failed searches, where visitors searched for something and were unable to find an article on that topic. This information is particularly useful for organizations to understand how visitors are interacting with their product, and businesses will easily be able to write articles on frequently failed searches.
Mobile Applications & Integrations
HelpCrunch offers a mobile application for iOS and Android, which allows teams to provide on-the-go customer service. There’s also a variety of integrations that help connect HelpCrunch with other applications and software tools.
Mobile Applications
HelpCrunch recently released a newer version of the mobile application, which is now called “HelpCrunch Inbox.” iOS and Android users alike have generally rated this version more favorably than the previous version of the application. When we tested the iOS mobile app, we found it to be reliable for live chat. Notifications for incoming chats were instantaneous and the application layout is very user-friendly.
Integrations
HelpCrunch has built integrations with many popular tools like Slack, Google Analytics, and WordPress. The current integrations are listed below.
- Magento
- Google Tag Manager
- Fluid
- OpenCart
- SpaceCraft
- Big Cartel
- 3DCart
- Jimdo
- PrestaShop
- Tumblr
- Squarespace
- Shopify
HelpCrunch Customer Support
To connect with HelpCrunch customer support, you can use live chat, call support phone numbers, or connect via email. They also post product updates on social media accounts.
| Customer Support Channels | Live Chat, Email, Phone |
| Other Support Resources | Knowledge Base, FAQs, Blog, Social Media |
| Application Status Page | No |
HelpCrunch Alternatives & Competitors
HelpCrunch is similar to softwares that combine live chat and marketing features, like Gist, Tidio, and Crisp. The best choice for you will depend on your budget and preferred features, so check out our reviews of these alternatives below.
Is HelpCrunch Right For You?
HelpCrunch is a customer communication software with key support and marketing features. It’s a modern and well-featured product that can serve customer support and marketing efforts. HelpCrunch is a tool that we recommend for most companies and particularly for ecommerce sites.
HelpCrunch is a powerful solution with a full suite of support and marketing features. Smaller organizations with fewer than five agents will benefit from what HelpCrunch has to offer, while larger businesses who can afford to pay up to $50 per agent would also benefit. There are alternatives that are worth consideration if you’re looking for cheaper options:
If you are interested in trying HelpCrunch, sign up for a 14-day free trial.