Help Scout

Turns out a lot of good thinking is fueled by Irish potatoes. 🥔 This week in Dublin, we made a whole afternoon out of weird questions. We called it Scout Labs. 🇮🇪 We took an engineer, a support pro, someone from finance, and a marketer (no, this isn’t the start of a joke) and put them on the same team. Then we gave them a real customer problem and three hours to figure it out together. A few things happen when you do this in the same room instead of over Slack: You ask the “dumb” question out loud, and it turns out three other people had it too. You learn that the person you’ve only known as a profile photo has strong opinions about inbox workflows. And they’re right. Someone says “Wait, customers actually do it like this..." and the whole plan changes in 30 seconds instead of 30 messages. None of it was perfectly polished, and that's not the point. It's about getting the people who touch different parts of the customer experience into one room and letting them solve something together.

When the group chat goes from “who’s landed?” to “which pub?” in about 40 minutes. ☘️ Day 1 of our retreat in Dublin is in the books! We’re a remote company, so for most of us this is the only week of the year we’re in the same room. Some people on the team are meeting for the first time today. It’s hard to put a number on what that does, but you notice it right away. Conversations go longer. People ask about each other’s lives, not just their projects. It’s much easier to work through problems with someone once you’ve shared a meal. We’re just getting started. Keep an eye out for more team content from us over the coming days!

Anyone who’s worked a support queue will recognize every item in this bag. 🎃 So before the candy comes out, a sincere thank-you to every support rep out there. You make the hard parts of the job look easy, and that’s no small trick. Tell us in the comments: what would you add to the bag?

AI is changing what customer support can be. So we pulled up some chairs and asked the people leading that change. Our Leadership Table dinner series landed at Leon's in NYC, with a group of CX and operations leaders from across the map. Some run huge support orgs in financial services. Others lead small, scrappy teams at fast-growing e-commerce brands. Everyone brought a fresh take on where support is headed. A few questions that sparked the best conversation: → What does great support look like when AI handles more of the conversation? → Where can AI make the biggest difference for customers and teams? → How do we set our teams up to get the most out of it? We left energized and full of new ideas (and good food). Thank you to everyone who joined us for such a fun, thoughtful night. 🍽️

The context in your Help Scout inbox shouldn’t stay stuck there. With MCP, Help Scout connects to AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT, so you can ask questions about your customer conversations in plain language: “What are customers asking about most this month?” “Which accounts have raised billing issues lately?” “What feedback have we heard about our new onboarding?” No exporting data. No piecing together spreadsheets just to get an answer. Explore what’s possible with MCP 👇 https://bit.ly/4yQX0d3

“Ty, describe the new site in one word.” “Dots.” “More than one word?” “A lot of dots.” 🔵🔵🔵 Our designer Ty Finck walks Hillary Noble through the thinking behind the new website. From the dot map to the custom animation library he built (yes, really!) Every dot is a conversation. Every conversation adds up. 💙 Go find your favorite dot → https://bit.ly/3xEakDi

Read at your own risk. Then tell us yours. Four words, go!👇

Our CPO, Scott Rocher, on why we built Topics into Help Scout. 💙 Keeping conversations organized shouldn’t depend on everyone remembering to tag things the same way, every time. Topics uses AI to identify what customers are reaching out about automatically, so patterns across your Inbox are easier to see. Learn more here: https://bit.ly/4yQX0d3

Your Inbox does a lot these days. Finding what you need shouldn't feel like a scavenger hunt. So we redesigned the Conversation Sidebar in Help Scout. The details that shape every reply now live in one place: → Conversation status, assignment, and SLAs → Customer history → Company information That means fewer screens, no tool-switching, and answers that are more accurate and more relevant to the person you're helping. 💙

From "boo" to "bye" What are you ghosting this season? 👻