Quarterly Release Notes, September 2020: Article Ratings, New Messages Editor

Welcome to this month’s release notes! Below, you’ll find the recording of Product Live, which includes our latest and greatest product improvements, plus a behind-the-scenes look at our product team and how we’re going about customer research and prioritizing our roadmap. Check it out to discover our newest features:

Article ratings

Track customer satisfaction on your Docs articles using new article ratings — available as both a complete table on the Docs report page and as specific stats for each Docs article. Use these ratings to ensure that your self-service experience is accomplishing what your customers need, and use that feedback to optimize if needed.

Learn how to activate and use Docs article ratings here.

iOS Mobile SDK v2

As mentioned in our May release notes, our mobile teams have been hard at work upgrading the experience natively and for those developing using our SDKs. This month’s update to our iOS Mobile SDK includes UI updates to make Help Scout mobile more closely resemble the desktop experience, as well as the addition of push notifications.

Details on our mobiles SDKs can be found here.

New messages editor

We’re really excited about the work happening on our editors across the entire Help Scout experience, and we’re thrilled to launch new markdown capability for messages. You can now include links, bolding, italics, and other styling options in your customer messages using Beacon. This adds creativity, emphasis, and new ways to proactively get your message out to your customers.

There’s more to come in the future with our editor updates — messages are just the start.

More features live this month

• Customer properties: Define and track any type of customer information you like, available in the conversation sidebar as well as in the customer profile. This is just the first step in our continued effort to help you serve each customer uniquely.

• Delete profile: Customer data deletion requests, especially those done to fulfill GDPR requirements, can now be done by customers directly in the app.

• Mailbox addresses (onboarding): We’ve streamlined the mailbox creation process to automatically generate the mailbox address for you in just two clicks. This allows you to set up new mailboxes and use all features related to them like chat, messages, and email. Don’t worry, you can still customize mailbox addresses and company subdomains to your liking as well, and connect your own email address to the mailbox.

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.

I use the replyFrom search operator every single day when I’m looking through previous conversations for some help. I’ll search for replies I’ve sent before plus keywords if something feels familiar to me — or will search for replies from specific teammates who I know have deeper knowledge on a specific topic. Finding common replies through that search can be a great indicator that it’s time to set up a saved reply for your team, too!

Annabelle Nichols

I’m a huge fan of our notes feature! I love having dedicated space on conversations to write down my thought process, work through complex problems, and collaborate with and learn from my teammates across the globe. Bonus: Check out our notes-specific search filter to find notes from your team more easily!

Kelly Hummell

We all love to meet customers, but sometimes (by law!) you have to delete customers. The Customers team has been happy to help facilitate that so far, but I'm really excited that users can now delete customers (and all related data) from their own Help Scout accounts!

Justin Wolfe

Saved replies are super handy to insert frequently used replies to your customers, but when combined with notes, saved replies can also be really helpful for internal communication. For example, we used saved replies to create templates which help us organize the details of a problem and our thought process. When we need to loop in another teammate on a tricky conversation, we can easily insert this template into a note and fill in the necessary details.

Sarah-Mei Estrada

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 use Help Scout’s mobile apps.

• You provide support via SMS or Twitter.

• You use customer data in Help Scout and have ideas about ways you’d like to use it moving forward.

• You're a new customer and would like to provide feedback on your free trial experience.

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.