Help Scout is a help desk, live chat, and knowledge base platform. Connecting it to your WordPress site lets recipes create conversations and update customers in Help Scout, and lets activity in Help Scout, such as a new conversation or a customer reply, start a recipe. This article covers connecting your Help Scout account and setting up the webhook Help Scout needs to send trigger data to your site.
If you have Uncanny Automator Lite, you’ll first need to connect your site to a free Uncanny Automator account, which gives you app credits to use with Help Scout. On a paid plan, app integrations are included.
What Help Scout can do in a recipe
Actions, available once your account is connected:
- Create a conversation in a mailbox
- Add a note to a conversation
- Add a tag to a conversation
- Update the properties of a customer
Triggers, available once you also set up the webhook described below:
- A conversation is created in a mailbox
- A conversation in a mailbox receives a reply from a customer
- A conversation’s tags are updated
- A note is added to a conversation
- A conversation receives a specific rating
Help Scout triggers start from activity in Help Scout, not from a visitor logged in to your site, so they work only in recipes of the Everyone type. See Recipe types: logged-in users and everyone.
Connect your Help Scout account
- In your WordPress dashboard, go to Automator > Settings > App integrations > Help Scout.
- Click Connect Help Scout account.
- On the Help Scout page that asks for permission to access your account, click Authorize. Help Scout returns you to the Automator settings page.
Help Scout is now connected, and its actions appear under Help Scout in the recipe builder’s picker. Until the account is connected, the picker hides Help Scout while its Ready-to-use only switch is on.
Send Help Scout activity to WordPress
For the triggers, Help Scout has to tell your site when something happens. You set this up by copying two values from Automator into Help Scout’s Webhooks app.
- On the Help Scout settings page in Automator, turn on Enable triggers and click Save settings. The page now shows a Secret key and a Callback URL, each with a copy button.
- In Help Scout, go to Manage > Apps.
- Search for Webhooks and select it.
- Click Install App.
- In the Webhooks Settings panel, paste the Secret Key and Callback URL you copied from Automator.
- Switch the app to Active, select the events for the triggers you plan to use (see the table below), and select the mailboxes that should send data to Automator.
- Click Save.
Once saved, the Help Scout triggers can start your recipes. Select the Help Scout event that matches each trigger you use:
| Trigger | Help Scout event |
|---|---|
| A conversation is created in a mailbox | Conversation Created |
| A conversation in a mailbox receives a reply from a customer | Conversation Customer Reply |
| A conversation’s tags are updated | Conversation Tags Updated |
| A note is added to a conversation | Conversation Note Added |
| A conversation receives a specific rating | Satisfaction Rating Received |
Tip: To send Help Scout activity to more than one site, for example when several of your WordPress sites use the same Help Scout account, click New Webhook at the bottom of the Webhooks settings and add each site’s Secret key and Callback URL as a separate webhook.
Note: Regenerate webhook URL on the Automator settings page creates a new Callback URL. Triggers stop working until you paste the new URL into Help Scout.
Related: Recipes for Everyone, Managing triggers, Finding integrations in the recipe builder
Comments (0)