Release Notes: Proactive Messages, Anonymous Chats, Zapier Improvements & More!
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 🚀
Reach out to your visitors with Messages
Drumroll, please …
Now you can leverage Beacon to send targeted messages to your visitors or customers — no coding required!
You can use Messages to announce a new feature, surface helpful content, or start a conversation.
Messages are available on our Standard and Plus plans as a $50/month add-on.
Learn more about Messages here, and stay tuned for next week’s article — a deep dive into how Messages extend Beacon with powerful triggers, allowing you to automatically reach out to the right people at the right time.
Chat without requiring an email address
When Beacon can’t identify the person starting a chat as an existing contact, by default it will automatically ask for an email address. In some cases (like a sales enquiry) that could add some unhelpful friction to the conversation. Good news! You can now turn off that automatic email address request in the Chat Options for any Beacon.
A new trigger for our Zapier App
Using Help Scout’s new Conversation Assigned trigger, you can use Zapier to take automatic actions whenever a conversation is assigned to any User. Notify them in another system, update a spreadsheet, or take one of the hundreds of other actions Zapier enables, without needing a developer!
We’ve also improved the samples provided when testing your triggers in Zapier, making it easier to get it right the first time.
… and even more improvements!
Quality: More than 25 bugs were squished across all of our apps.
iOS improvements: Our iOS app has undergone substantial improvements for performance and iOS13 compatibility.
Search upgrades: We’ve completed a long-awaited search infrastructure improvement project. This should lead to faster, more relevant searches.
Customer team roundup 💪 ✨
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.
Up this month: Shaun, writing in from Southampton, England
We regularly hear from customers interested in pulling data from their Help Scout account to use in external platforms — and often those folks aren’t aware we’ve got some additional resources that can be made available to their engineers. Here’s some information to share with your development team if you’ve always wanted to do a little more with your data.
Whether your end goal is to keep copies of all conversation data in an external CRM tool, or to feed that information into a data analysis service, you’ll be happy to know we have a healthy assortment of open-source projects to help you get started with using our Mailbox and Docs APIs — including some Custom Apps that’ll add information to your customer sidebar.
To give credit where credit is due, some of these projects are created by folks in the Help Scout community, and you’ll find the attribution listed alongside a link to the package here. If you’re a developer working on a project that might also benefit the wider Help Scout community, get in touch — we may be able to add your contributions to our Open Source page!
While I'm not an engineer, I’ve personally enjoyed using a recent addition to the Custom Apps section. It's called SnoozeBot, and in the words of its developer Shaun (no relation), it makes snoozing conversations in Help Scout super easy!
Emily Chapman
Emily is an alum of Help Scout, where we make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes.
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