Quarterly Release Notes, March 2020: COVID-19 Resources, Chat Ratings, and More

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

✨ What’s New 🚀

New in Beacon!

Now, onto what’s new in Help Scout! Since the beginning of the year, the team has shipped 238 bug fixes and improvements.

Beacon, your customers companion on your website or app, has been the focus of many of these.

Chat Ratings

Keep a pulse on customer satisfaction with our new Chat Ratings feature.

Knowing what your customers think of the service they’re getting is a key measure for delighting them time after time. That’s why we’ve added happiness ratings to web chat conversations.

Help Scout’s new Chat Ratings feature enables you to gather real-time feedback from visitors and customers on their chat conversations with your team — and measure it all in the Happiness Reports specifically for chat. You can also dig into each of your team member’s performance and specific conversations where you’d like.

Note: This is currently web-only, but we’re working on making it also available for mobile!

Learn how to use Chat Ratings here. We’ll be rolling out Chat Ratings to groups of customers, so if you don’t see it in your account right away, hang tight and it will arrive soon!

New Beacon callback events for web

We’ve added four new supported web callback events to the Beacon Javascript API. These notify you of more actions taken with Beacon.

• article-viewed → triggered when a Docs Article is opened in Beacon

• chat-started → triggered when a Chat is started via Beacon

• email-sent → triggered when a message is sent via Beacon

• search → triggered when a Docs search is performed via Beacon

Get the details in our developer docs.

Beacon performance improvements

From the beginning, Beacon was built to be light and fast, to help your customers without slowing down your site or app experience. We’ve always taken this seriously as it directly impacts your customers experience.

This month the team reduced the Beacon embed size by 40%, which will help keep your customer’s experience fast and smooth while getting the benefits of docs search, chat, or emailing your team through Beacon.

Make your website or app more helpful

Beacon lets you suggest relevant help content, offer live chat, and give customers instant access to their support history — all without leaving your site.

Try for free

A few more Beacon upgrades

• Emojis! Customers can now send emojis when emailing or chatting with your team.

• You can now rename Beacon’s HelpBot to whatever you’d like for a more customized experience.

Find exactly what you need

Searching Help Scout is one of the easiest ways to quickly find specific conversations, customers, or Docs articles based on all sorts of criteria. We’ve added two new ways to filter searches to find the exact information you need faster:

• replyFrom - Find a specific User Reply in your conversation history.

• noteFrom - Find a note from a particular teammate.

These join more than a dozen built-in search filters to customize how you search in Help Scout!

New in mobile

Often we find customers need to give an FYI or include someone not currently involved in a conversation in Help Scout. Forwarding conversations does the trick; it's now available in our Android and iOS apps.

We’ve also added chat support to our Beacon mobile SDK for Android! Serve customers wherever they need it by giving them the option of chatting with your team live through your mobile app.

Easier changes to customer profiles with PATCH endpoint

We’ve made it easier to change customer profiles when syncing from a third party or external source using our Mailbox API. The upgraded PATCH customer endpoint lets you update individual profile fields such as email address or phone number, in a single API call.

See the details on this change and more in our Mailbox API changelog.

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: David!