Release Notes: Channel-Based Reports Are Rolling Out!

Release Notes is our monthly update that highlights recent product improvements we’ve made so you can easily stay up to date on what’s new.

What's new

Introducing channel-based reports

Up to this point, Help Scout’s reports have always been a bit more email-centric, as email is the primary channel we’ve been focused on. But with the launch of Beacon and Chat, it was time to take a different approach, and the end result is channel-based reports.

The All Channels (formerly Conversations) report and the Email (formerly Productivity) report both got some great new additions, and we now have all-new reports for Chat and Phone. Here’s a look at the new All Channels report and the channel-based filter, along with a new chart that shows volume by channel over time.

We’re most excited about the new Chat report, designed to help you measure your team’s chat volume and efficiency over time. From wait time to response time, missed chats and average chat duration, the Chat report helps you make sense of how your live chat operations are shaping up.

Aside from the new reports, we’ve made improvements to our existing reports as well. And now that we’ve got a concise channel breakdown, we made a few tweaks to how Views work, too.

For a full and detailed breakdown of what’s changed on the reporting front, take a look at this article: Understanding Reports in Help Scout

Beacon default language

Non-English speakers rejoice! The Beacon Builder now includes a new Language selector on the Translate tab. Instead of having to translate every label into your language of choice, you can select from one of 34 languages in two clicks.

Individual labels are still available if you’d like to make tweaks to fit your brand voice. And please let us know if you find an incorrect translation. We’ll be happy to fix it!

Android app updates

In addition to resolving a few bugs with notes and draft replies, the team has shipped several new performance improvements. Using the app should be a lot faster now, even with a dodgy mobile connection.

Get the latest version of Help Scout’s Android app on the Google Play Store.

Jira app update

We’ve added a new custom field for Help Scout conversation counts in Jira, so you can see how many conversations are linked to a Jira issue. As long as your account is connected with administrator privileges in Jira, this should work out of the box. The next time you link an issue, you’ll see the Conversation Count field on the default Jira screen. It’s worth mentioning that you’ll only see conversation counts for new issues that you link with Help Scout.

Reminder: We’re retiring Mailbox API 1.0 on June 6th, 2019

We’ve got a big change to our API just around the corner, and it may require action on your part. On June 6th, we’ll be saying goodbye to our legacy Mailbox API 1.0. If you’re currently using the Mailbox API 1.0, you’ll need to migrate to Mailbox API 2.0 before June 6th so you don’t experience any service interruptions.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions regarding this transition. We’re here to help!

Mailbox API 2.0: Custom Fields update

The List Conversations and Get Conversation endpoints in Mailbox API 2.0 are now a bit friendlier! We’ve added a new text field to the Custom Field object that will return the plain text value for Custom Fields, alongside the numerical ID.

In support, little things can make a big difference — even seemingly small changes can save your whole team some precious time. In this section, we highlight the maybe-overlooked (but very powerful!) changes that are making our own customer champions cheer.

Customer team roundup 💪✨

Up this month: Yours truly, writing in from London

Custom apps and CRM integrations are wonderful tools that can help you display additional information directly in the conversation sidebar, so that your team has all the details they need to support your customers.

With Mailbox API 2.0, you can take this one step further and automatically funnel that data into Custom Fields, making it possible to search for matching conversations or automate actions for specific fields with Workflows. Use webhooks to alert your external systems of newly created conversations, then use our API to automatically fill in each custom field.

What’s more, once your Custom Fields are filled in, reporting is super easy! You can use Views to filter any report down to the Custom Field level.

While this setup does require some programming know-how, it’s one of the many nifty integrations that you can create with Mailbox API 2.0.

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