Quarterly Release Notes, November 2020: Advanced Permissions, Message Reports

Welcome to the final release notes of 2020! Watch Product Live below, which includes our latest and greatest product improvements, a look back at 2020, and an inside look at an internal customer interview project at Help Scout called The Happiness Report:

Advanced permissions

Advanced permissions help you quickly and confidently manage changing team needs by giving your team access the right information and capabilities in Help Scout. We’re expanding advanced permissions with new permissions on the company, team, and user level. A few examples of what you can do with new permissions:

• Make a user an administrator, but only for one mailbox.

• Limit Docs access to a few people on your team.

• Control who can live chat with customers.

• Give admins sole access to reporting data.

Plus and Company plan customers will get all the new permissions.

Learn more about advanced permissions.

Message reports

Proactive messages allow you to engage leads, onboard new customers, or preemptively support customers. New message reports allow you to easily track views, clicks, and engagements on your in-app messages. Now, you’ll be able to see how well a certain message resonates with your customers, repeat your successes, and make changes to improve performance.

Android chat ratings

In order to provide great customer service, it’s important to collect customers' feedback on their interactions with your team. Chat ratings gives you the ability to quickly assess this using a happy/neutral/sad reaction rating. We’ve also included the option to leave additional written feedback so your customers can expand on their ratings.

Learn more about our Android app.

Additional Updates

• Customer properties are now available for Standard plan customers.

• Article ratings are available on the iOS SDK.

• Landscape view is now supported on the iOS app.

• We’ve overhauled our SDK Documentation at developer.helpscout.com.

• Coming soon: Chat ratings on Android SDK

• Coming soon: Anonymous chat support on iOS SDK

Cool tips

Every release notes, our C-team gives tactical tips for serving your customers better using Help Scout, inspired by our own best practices.

Negative rating comments often give you a good opportunity to turn around an unhappy customer or catch a follow up response that you’d otherwise miss. You can use a workflow folder to check those rating comments and make sure nothing flies under your radar. The screenshot above shows how to set that up!

Katie Harlow

I’m a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts in Help Scout because being able to move efficiently within conversations is important to me. Sometimes removing my hand from my keyboard to click on something can admittedly slow my flow. But with shortcuts, I could be eyeing the middle of a long, beastly conversation and jump right into typing up a note I need to leave on it (N key), or quickly add a tag to it (T key) instead of scrolling all the way to the top to perform those actions. I’ve found that this small adjustment to my everyday work style has improved my productivity in many cases and makes working on conversations a seamless experience for me.

Angie Vargas

I love using keyboard shortcuts to save time. A few of my favorites are R to reply, N to add a note, S to change the status, Cmd + Shift + S to open saved replies, and J and K to move between conversations. They can take some practice to learn, but now I don’t even think about them!

Kristi Thompson

At Help Scout, we use Jira to track requests and bug reports, so I find our Jira integration super helpful as I’m working the queue. Using the sidebar integration, you’re able to search through existing issues, create new ones when needed, and link any conversation to your Jira issues — all without leaving Help Scout. It’s a handy tool for shaving time off documentation while helping keep an accurate recording of report volume.

Elyse Roach

It’s the holiday season. 🎄 We’re almost at the end of another long year. If you’re like me and work with a lot of rockstars, you’ll want to know who’s available when a holiday falls. To keep everyone on the same page, try spinning up an internal holiday availability tracker via Google Sheets to keep your team (and company) in the loop on who’s around on those special days. Here’s an example to get started, but whatever you come up with should encourage people to step away once in a while. 🙂

Shaun McIlroy

Help us keep improving

We’re looking for current Help Scout customers who fit any of the criteria below to talk with us about their experiences and help inform our roadmap over the next year and beyond:

• You are an active user of messages in Help Scout.

• You use advanced permissions in Help Scout.

• You’ve recently onboarded to Help Scout as a new customer.

We’re also looking for customers to give feedback on prototypes for the following features/use cases:

• Triaging and organizing in Help Scout

• Customer profile on mobile

If you’re interested in helping, please email research@helpscout.com with whichever of the above criteria apply to you, and we’ll reach out. We’d like to learn more about how you work and what you’re looking for.