Quarterly Release Notes, June 2021: Messages Updates, Fundraising Emails, & More
Welcome to Help Scout’s release notes! This month — along with product updates — we’ve got an exciting new email series straight from our CEO, as well as an opportunity to talk with our research team. Let’s get to it.
Image support in proactive messages
Spruce up your proactive messages with images. Educate, inform, or delight your customers with images that support your post, including GIFs! Building off our addition last quarter of Markdown to messages, we’re continuing to add more rich content features to creatively engage your customers.
Coming soon to messages: Target your audience with customer properties. Send proactive messages to specific customers defined by properties you’ve created in Help Scout. With properties, you’ll now have even more control over which customers or visitors are seeing your messages.
Customer properties updates
We continue to improve the experience of managing customer data in Help Scout. This quarter’s improvements include consistently showing the properties block and making it easier to view, edit, and copy customer properties from the sidebar.
Zapier integrates with customer properties
Our Zapier integration with customer properties is live. You can keep specific customer information up to date between Help Scout and tools like Google Sheets or a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot.
Customer updated webhook improvement
Finally, there are more ways than ever to keep your customer data in sync. We’ve added customer properties to the customer updated webhook, which can be used to notify you of changes to a customer profile to help you keep customer information aligned across the tools you use in your business.
Research
Our research team is curious to talk with Help Scout customers about how they use customer data. Specifically, if you’d be willing to talk with our team about how your business likes to segment or organize data about your customers to help us improve our product, please reach out to research@helpscout.com. These conversations help guide our team in continuing to innovate the Help Scout product; we appreciate your involvement!
Fundraising for the Reluctant Founder
Our CEO, Nick Francis, launched a free email series to help founders understand the fundraising process. For companies like us at Help Scout, the typical hyper-growth model isn’t a path everyone wants to follow. You don’t have to raise money in search of a big exit, IPO, or bootstrap on your own dime. There’s a path somewhere in the middle. You can build a successful, growing business without sacrificing your values along the way.
In this series, Nick breaks down the fundraising process, from how to prepare for your first time and operational know-how, to working with investors and mistakes to avoid.
Fundraising for the Reluctant Founder is a free five-week email series available here.
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.
If you’re looking to extend your team’s ability to work smarter, check out our integrations — there’s something for everyone, from automation to SMS support. We also have a bunch of open source API projects created by Help Scout customers that might help get a project over the finish line.
Paola Maciel
While the notification station is a great place to see notifications or @mentions, you can also set up a workflow to give you a nice overall view of all of these messages in one place.
Simply set up a brand new automatic workflow, and set it up to look like this:
Conditions: Body > Note contains > @alissa
Actions: Copy to folder > Alissa's mentions > Visible to Me
You can also apply it to previous conversations if you’d like to see all of your older convos as well. Some of us on C-team use it, and find it really helpful to check out convos we need to follow up on, or ones we were unclear about and wanted to see how another teammate handled. Huzzah!
Kelly Herring
Alex Eaton
When he isn’t running in the mountains, Alex is helping run product launches at Help Scout, where we make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes.
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