Help Scout keeps your team organized
and your customers happy with an array of features designed
for optimal team collaboration on customer support
and managing email at scale.
The Help Scout Dashboard gives you
an overview of what's happening in your account,
like the active conversations in your mailboxes
or access to your knowledge base settings.
Let's pop into the Support Mailbox
to see Help Scout in action.
Once you forward your email into Help Scout,
you'll see all your email conversations
flow into these folders.
Help Scout has five default folders.
And you can create custom folders using workflows
in the mailbox settings.
Each conversation can be one of four statuses in Help Scout--
active, pending, closed, and spam.
The unassigned, mine, and assigned folders
hold only active and pending conversations.
Active conversations are conversations
that require action.
You can immediately spot them by their bold heading.
Pending conversations are no longer
bold and sink to the bottom of any folder they are in.
Use the pending status when a conversation is on hold,
like when you need to wait on internal information
before responding or for conversations
that are a lower priority.
Any conversation that's not assigned
to any user on your team first lands
in the unassigned folder, the default state for new emails
that arrive in Help Scout.
The mine folder shows any active or pending conversations
assigned to you, the user.
And the assigned folder is where you'll
see all the active and pending conversations assigned
to anyone on your team.
In the assigned folder, you have an additional column
where you can see who each conversation is assigned to
and filter these conversations by team member, which is great
if you have someone out for the day
and you want to see what's coming in for them.
On each conversation, you'll see at a glance who a conversation
is from, any tags included to categorize
the conversation, the number of interactions
with that customer on that chain,
and when the last update was made.
You can use these sorting options
to control the order conversations appear
in your folders.
Help Scout has a couple of handy features
to keep your team members from stepping on each other's toes.
When another team member views a conversation,
you'll see a little triangle indicating that in the corner.
A yellow indicator means a team member
is viewing your conversation.
And a red indicator means they are applying.
Pop into a conversation and see their head shot
appear with the same yellow or red indication.
And if two users on your team end up
responding at the same time, Help Scout
sends you a little message from Traffic Cop.
Traffic Cop triggers if another user replies, leaves a note,
or if the customer applies at the same time you're
replying to the conversation.
It stops you from sending an incomplete reply
by giving you the option to edit or discard the message
or send it anyway.
Now that we're in a conversation,
let's take a look at how you'll build better relationships
with your customers.
The first thing you'll notice in every conversation
is the customer profile to the right.
We pull in as much information as we
can based on your customer's email address using a service
called Full Contact.
You might see a link to their Twitter profile, LinkedIn,
or websites.
Full Contact works pretty well at pulling
in relevant information.
But you can edit any of these fields
by clicking on your customer's name if you need to.
If you have confirmed the same customer writes in
from two different email addresses,
you can add the additional email address here
to merge any customer history attached to that email address
to the same customer.
You can also add notes to the customer
if you'd like to make a note of anything
that you'd like to keep attached to that customer
whenever they write in.
Under previous conversations, you'll see a list of every time
that customer has communicated with your team,
either by phone, email, or chat.
Click inside to get a closer look.
You can either open the conversation
if you'd like to update or merge the conversations to pull
information from that conversation
into the conversation you're currently viewing.
Merging pulls all of the threads of the conversation together.
It's great if you have a customer write multiple times
on the same day about different things
or a customer who keeps asking about the same case
a few different times in the week.
If you're pulling in any information from one
of our integrations in the apps menu, your CRM, or a custom app
from an order system, that information
will appear down here.
The first arrow here opens the reply editor for you
to respond to your customer.
Add a CC or BCC to loop in whoever you need to.
Add attachments, formatting, hyperlinks, inline images,
or animated GIFs, or toggle the HTML.
Use save replies to quickly drop in prepped and proven answers
to your customers' most frequently asked questions.
We'll pull in the customer's name using variables.
You can also save new replies from the editor.
Just save the reply and replace the customer and user
name with a variable from the drop down menu.
Name the saved reply, and you have
it to use for all future conversations.
If you want to shoot this conversation over
to a team member after you've replied,
you can change the status back to Active or Pending
and assign it to them from here.
The Send Options dropdown gives you more control
over where you land after sending a reply if you work
very collaboratively with your team, assigning lots of notes,
or moving between mailboxes, change your redirect to send
and stay on page.
Send and go back to the folder if you'd
like to check in on what conversations are coming in
before moving onto the next one.
Or if you'd like to just move super quickly
through the queue, you can send and go to next active.
If you need to come back to this conversation later,
click on the check mark here to save as a draft.
Help Scout also auto saves every few seconds.
So you don't ever have to worry about losing
all of your hard work if you accidentally close a tab.
Find all of your drafts in the drafts folder.
Communicate behind the scenes with your team members with
Notes, .
Internal only messages designed for team collaboration
customers can never, ever, ever see what's posted in a note.
So you can use those to freely communicate whatever
you need to with your team.
Delegate work to resident experts
by assigning conversations to other team members
or change the status of a conversation
if it's better to just quickly close
or mark as pending to handle later.
Tags are a handy little tool that
help you categorize your conversations
in any way you need to.
You can use tags to identify VIP customers,
trigger automated workflows, identify conversation trends,
filter search results, or group conversations into folders.
Another handy feature with tags--
click on tags already on conversations
to call in a tag search, and look
through how similar conversations were
handled previously without leaving the editor.
Manual workflows group several actions together at once
and run on your command.
You can use these to apply a set of actions
like adding a save reply, tag, assignee, and status change
to a conversation with just two easy clicks.
In the More Actions menu, you can delete a conversation,
follow a conversation if you want to keep tabs on it
from your inbox, forward to an email outside of Help Scout,
move the conversation to another mailbox,
or toggle the Doc Search.
The Doc Search bar makes all of your Docs articles
easy to drop in your replies as a neat and clean URL.
To start a conversation with a customer
or compose a new conversation, select this speech bubble
in the lower left sidebar menu.
Just type your customer's name or email address,
and we'll auto suggest a dropdown
with any customer you have communicated
with via Help Scout.
Choose the suggested customer or add a new one,
and we'll populate the customer profile.
New conversations have all the same editor
and organizational features as replies, like tags,
saved replies, status changes, and assignees.
If you offer phone support to your customers,
just choose the phone icon here to log a phone call,
and the conversation becomes a new internal note.
Take any notes from the phone call and save.
And we'll include a record of that conversation
to the customer's profile.
Let's dive into the mailbox settings
to see how you can customize each Help Scout
mailbox to your needs.
Each mailbox has its own distinct settings
where you can setup aliases and dictate the basics of how
that mailbox operates; change your
from name to determine whether or not your emails look
like they are coming from your mailbox for a more
corporate look or feel, or user's needs for a more
personal touch; control ownership over conversations
after a reply has been sent; and choose from one
of two templates for how your emails appear
to your customers.
The plain template just looks like an ordinary old email
from Gmail to your customer.
The fancy template has a little more panache
but still keeps it simple, minimal, and cool.
Connection Settings is all about how we get messages
into and out of Help Scout.
You can also set up custom SMTP settings
if you prefer to send mail from your own servers,
keeping it safe from the jaws of spam folders.
Mailbox Permissions allows you to limit access
to certain mailboxes for an extra layer of security
across your account.
Make sure no precious data slips through the cracks with custom
fields.
Requiring fields and presetting values from a dropdown
means cleaner data for your reports
and more accurate automation for your workflows.
The Auto Reply sends an automated message out
whenever a customer contacts you for the first time in 24 hours.
You can choose to send it all the time,
or you can choose to only send it outside of office hours.
Edit, manage, or delete your save replies here.
And you can also set up your manual and automated workflows.
Workflows automate some of the grunt work
of routing conversations to team members or folders,
sending mass updates to customers, or just
about anything else you can think of.
You can either trigger a bunch of actions on command
with manual workloads or run them
behind the scenes based on a set of conditions
with automatic workflows.
The Satisfaction Ratings are customer happiness survey
feature.
Customize this text and design however you like.
And use the Translate option to change the words in the survey
to translate to another language or perfectly fit
your brand's voice.
Once you start using Help Scout with your team,
you'll want to monitor team performance.
For that, let's check out Reports.
Help Scout Reports give you insights that drive results.
You can filter all reports by date range,
including custom ranges as well as drill down on your data
to more targeted metrics using a set of filtering conditions
with our reports' views.
You can save and revisit any view in just two clicks.
The Conversation Report gives you
everything you need to change the conversation
with your customers, from problems to praise,
by pinpointing what they write in about and when.
See when your team is busiest, shuffle schedules when
you need the whole team on deck, or make a data backed
case for that extra hire.
The Productivity Report tracks your team's customer helping
velocity and identify sticking points
to push through with even greater momentum.
Company and User Reports elevate your team
to the best they can be with a visual summary of each team
member's performance.
As a manager, everything you need
to provide valuable feedback and guidance for your team
is on a single page.
So you can be ready for a coaching session in minutes.
The Happiness Report is the closest
you can get to your customer's true feelings
without hiring a telepath.
The customer satisfaction ratings
filter in this report learn what works with your customers
and what doesn't by easily viewing rated conversations
and view comments at a glance.
So you'll never miss out on an opportunity
to follow up with an angry customer or any lingering
questions.
If this all sounds like everything
you need to provide your customers
with a great experience while scaling with your business,
then sign up for our 15-day free trial now.