Help Scout for Education
Better student support starts in the inbox
Help Scout is shared inbox software for universities and schools that removes the friction from managing student and faculty email requests.
Whether you're fielding admissions and financial aid questions or troubleshooting a Wi-Fi issue in the dorms, Help Scout helps you stay organized, collaborate more easily, and respond faster.
Trusted by 1,000+ universities and educational institutions
Is Outlook or Gmail slowing you down?
Basic email tools work well for individual email accounts, but aren’t designed for team or cross-functional work. They may be fine at first, but eventually the system will buckle.
You end up with:
No accountability
Staff and student aides don’t know which requests they’re responsible for. Some messages receive multiple replies, while others slip through the cracks.
No clarity
Without collaboration tools, teams forward emails back and forth, resulting in convoluted message chains that are frustrating to staff and students alike.
No oversight
Email clients rarely come with reporting abilities, leaving leadership without any data on volume, response time, team performance, or pain points.
No bandwidth
As volume grows and requests pile up, your staff can struggle to manage the load.
Help Scout solves the shared email problem
Help Scout’s shared inbox is designed for the way education teams actually work — so your staff saves time and your students get fast assistance.
Every conversation, all in one place
It’s easy for important emails to get buried under newsletters, interdepartmental messages, and spam when they’re spread across staff inboxes.
Help Scout brings all of your school's shared email accounts (registrar@, admissions@, housing@, etc.) into a single tool so that every message is accounted for.
Give every message a home
Create separate inboxes for departments like financial aid and IT, or organize your staff into teams and manage all of your communications from one inbox.
Get instant context
Have the details you need (like contact information and past emails) right alongside the conversation so you never have to hunt them down.
Maintain consistency
Set up a library of saved replies for your most common questions, allowing anyone to hop into the inbox and be confident they’re providing the best answer.
Draft replies in seconds
Use AI to draft initial responses to incoming emails based on sources like your account’s conversation history. All you have to do is review and hit send.
Stay focused
Avoid inbox overwhelm with custom views that allow you to concentrate on a specific subset of messages based on criteria like time, sender, or subject.
Save time with automation
Automate busy work like labeling conversations, sending auto responses, or passing messages on to the right team.
Collaborate with ease
Group projects have a bad reputation, but Help Scout has features that take the stress out of working as a team.
Your staff will always know what they’re responsible for and have the tools they need to communicate effectively.
Give assignments
Assign emails to individual people or departments to create accountability and ensure that every question is always fielded by the right person for the job.
Route email automatically
Cut down on inbox triage time and help keep workloads balanced by automatically routing conversations to specific people or teams.
Prevent duplicate work
See when someone is actively viewing or responding to an email to avoid extra work and stay off each other’s toes.
Leave notes for teammates
Tag in a colleague for help on a tough question or leave a private comment to provide background information right in the email thread.
Summarize long emails
Use AI to quickly get up to speed on conversations so you can weigh in or send a reply faster.
See every request through
Set conversation statuses to easily identify which requests are complete and which still need your attention.
Make better decisions
If you don’t understand what kind of issues your community is facing or the workload your team is taking on, it can be difficult to make decisions.
Help Scout comes with dashboards right out of the box to break down the basics. You can also create custom filters to help you zero in on what’s most important.
Monitor volume and performance
Track metrics by department, team, or individual to better understand workload, current trends, and organizational efficiency.
Plan ahead
Identify peak times to help with scheduling and preparing for busy times on campus like new student orientation or the dreaded “semester surge.”
Anticipate student needs
Whether it’s feedback on a class or a request for better food in the dining hall, use reports to spot pain points and identify opportunities for improvement.
One of the biggest challenges was managing multiple inboxes in Gmail. The administrative work was astounding. Help Scout helped us stay productive
Ease your email burden with more paths to support
School-wide support doesn’t have to end with email. Help Scout comes with several other ways to get students, parents, and faculty the solutions they need.
Live chat
Not every conversation is suited to email. If you’re handling issues that need real-time responses, Help Scout’s live chat channel is a great option. It’s managed right in the inbox and can be turned on or off depending on your team’s availability.
Proactive messaging
Need to get the word out about an upcoming deadline or event? Add a pop up or banner message to your university or department website. These require minimal IT assistance to get up and running and give you more ways to amplify announcements.
Help center
If your team is fielding a lot of repeat questions, take the pressure off by creating a knowledge base full of the information students need to know. Have internal resources you need to store? You can create private help centers for your team too.
Self-service chatbot
Questions don’t just come up during business hours. Help students 24/7 with AI Answers, a chatbot powered by generative AI. It uses content from your help center and other sources like your school’s website to provide reliable answers, fast.
You've got this
Getting started with Help Scout is easier than you might think. And if you get stuck, just reach out.
No IT headaches
Setting up a Help Scout account is straightforward and can usually be completed with minimal involvement from your IT department.
Intuitive from the start
You can become a Help Scout power user within an hour, making it an ideal solution for seasonal and student workers.
We're here to help
Have questions? Our team is available 24/6 to provide support and find solutions to any challenges that surface during implementation (and beyond).
If I get a student email to my Outlook account I immediately forward it to Help Scout so if that student reaches out again I know that conversation is already linked.
Built to clear your security review
Help Scout maintains high security standards and can be configured to meet the needs of most colleges and universities.
Encryption
All web application communications are encrypted over 256-bit SSL, which cannot be viewed by third parties.
Access
Use two-factor authentication (2FA), SSO, or authentication via any SAML-compatible identity provider.
Permissions
Roles and permissions let you control your team’s access, including limiting what student workers can see and do.
See how universities like yours use Help Scout
Wondering how all of this looks in practice? Here’s more on how other universities are using a shared inbox to create a better service experience for their students and staff.
Already using Help Scout and want to go deeper?
Explore our education hubFAQ
A shared inbox is a type of software that is designed to help teams, departments, or even entire universities manage email collaboratively.
Emails flow into a shared inbox just like they do with standard email clients like Outlook or Gmail. However, once there, teams can use helpful features like conversation assignments, private notes, collision detection, and reporting to create accountability, reduce friction, and respond to messages from students, parents, and faculty more quickly.
Help Scout works by forwarding your existing email account (ex. admissions@, housing@, etc.) into our system. Once messages land in your Help Scout inbox, you can use all of our features to respond. All emails sent from Help Scout will still be sent using your existing address.
However, once you make the switch, all emails must be handled within your Help Scout inbox.
We partner with a company called Import2, which makes migrating old messages from other services like Gmail, Outlook, Zendesk, and Intercom really easy.
Read more about Import2’s service.
Yes. Access to incoming messages happens at the inbox level. Depending on your pricing plan, you may be able to have multiple inboxes (e.g. one for IT, one for the financial aid department, another for admissions, etc.), and then you can decide which users have access to each of them separately.
We understand that every institution has unique needs around access and privacy. Our team would be happy to chat with you to discuss solutions in Help Scout that would meet your specific needs.
Feel free to reach out to our support team or schedule a demo.
Our pre-built reporting dashboards allow you to measure important metrics like conversation volume, resolution time, and customer satisfaction across all channels.
You can also create custom reporting filters that allow you to track conversations based on criteria like tags and custom fields.
Learn more about reporting in Help Scout.
While the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) doesn’t have a formal certification process, Help Scout is intentionally designed to help schools meet their obligations under the law.
Our FERPA-conscious approach means:
Secure by default – All communications and data are transmitted over encrypted connections and stored securely, helping institutions safeguard student information.
Controlled access – Role-based permissions ensure only authorized staff can access student-related conversations and records.
No secondary use of data – We do not use or share education records for marketing or other non-authorized purposes.
Configurable to meet policy – Institutions can set retention policies, control exports, and manage integrations in line with their own FERPA compliance requirements.
Learn more about our privacy and safety policies.
