Help Scout

Last updated on Feb 03, 2023

Help Scout is an email-based customer support software that assists small businesses and teams manage their customer relationships. Help Scout is similar to your email with a mailbox at the top of the hierarchy. All customer-related communication is tracked through conversations and threads in the mailbox, eliminating the need to manage ticket numbers and case numbers. In Help Scout, you can create multiple mailboxes for each shared email address. This allows your users across various departments, such as support, marketing, and customer success, to collaborate and manage different products or brands from a single account. Help Scout also provides your users visibility into the emails being responded to in real-time.

You can replicate the data from your HelpScout account to a Destination database or data warehouse using Hevo Pipelines. Refer to the Data Model section for information on the objects that Hevo creates in your Destination.

Setup

Data Sync

Prerequisites

An active account in Help Scout.
An active Help Scout user with access to at least one customer mailbox.
A subscription to Help Scout’s Plus or Company plan if you want to read data from the Custom Fields object.

Configuring Help Scout as a Source

Perform the following steps to configure Help Scout as the Source in your Pipeline:

Click PIPELINES in the Asset Palette.
Click + CREATE in the Pipelines List View.
In the Select Source Type page, select Help Scout.
In the Configure your Help Scout account page, click + ADD HELP SCOUT ACCOUNT.
Log in to your Help Scout account, and click Authorize, providing Hevo access to your Help Scout data.
In the Configure your Help Scout Source page, specify the following:
- Pipeline Name: A unique name for the Pipeline, not exceeding 255 characters.
- Authorized Account (Non-editable): This field is pre-filled with the email address that you selected earlier when connecting to your Help Scout account.
- Historical Sync Duration: The duration for which the existing data in the Source must be ingested. Default value: 3 Months.
  
  Note: If you select All Available Data, Hevo fetches all the data created since January 01, 2011, for your account.
Click TEST & CONTINUE.
Proceed to configuring the data ingestion and setting up the Destination.

Data Replication

Default Pipeline Frequency	Minimum Pipeline Frequency	Maximum Pipeline Frequency	Custom Frequency Range (Hrs)
15 Mins	5 Mins	24 Hrs	1-24

Note: You must set the custom frequency in hours as an integer value. For example, 1, 2, 3 but not 1.5 or 1.75.

Historical Data: In the first run of the Pipeline, Hevo ingests the historical data for all the objects and loads it to the Destination. For the Conversation and Customer objects, the historical data is ingested based on the historical sync duration selected when creating the Pipeline. Default duration: 3 Months.

For the objects, Mailbox, Tag, Team, User, and Workflow, Hevo ingests all historical data present in your account.
Incremental Data: Once the historical load is complete, all new and updated records for the Conversation and Customer objects are synchronized with your Destination as per the Pipeline frequency.

For Mailbox, Tag, Team, User, and Workflow, which are Full Load objects, Hevo fetches all the data but loads only the new and updated records to the Destination as per the Pipeline frequency. It achieves this by filtering the previously ingested data based on the position stored at the end of the last ingestion run.

Schema and Primary Keys

Hevo uses the following schema to upload the records in the Destination:

Data Model

The following is the list of tables (objects) that are created at the Destination when you run the Pipeline:

Object	Description
Mailbox	Contains details about the mailboxes in your Help Scout account. A mailbox is similar to an inbox and holds the emails sent by your customers.
Mailbox Folders	Contains details about the folders that you may have created to organize the conversations sent to your mailboxes.
Conversation	Contains details about the communications with your customers. A conversation can be of the type: - email - chat - phone
Conversation Threads	Contains details about the parts of a conversation, such as an email, a note, or a response sent to a mailbox. In Help Scout, each part of the conversation is called a thread.
Conversation Attachments	Contains details about the attachments associated with the conversation threads in your mailboxes.
Customers	Contains details about the customers in your Help Scout account.
Customer Address	Contains the addresses of the customers in your Help Scout account.
Customer Chat	Contains details about the chat handles that your customers use.
Customer Email	Contains details about the email addresses of the customers in your Help Scout account.
Customer Phone	Contains details about the phone numbers associated with a customer in your Help Scout account.
Customer Profile	Contains details about the social media profiles of your customers.
Customer Website	Contains details about all the websites associated with a particular customer in your Help Scout account.
User	Contains details about the users, who are members of an organization or a team, in your Help Scout account.
Team	Contains details about the group of users who work together as a single unit on conversations in a mailbox.
Team User	Contains details about the users and the teams to which they belong.
Tag	Contains details about the tags that you have added to the conversations in your mailbox. For example, a tag to track conversations from priority customers.
Workflow	Contains details about the workflows created for the mailboxes in your account. A workflow is similar to an email filter and can be automatic or manual. For example, an automatic workflow to filter conversations based on their subject line.
Custom Fields	Contains details about the custom fields that you may have created to categorize, prioritize, or diagnose conversations. For example, a custom field to identify the priority level of a conversation received in your mailbox. Note: You need to be subscribed to Help Scout’s Plus or Company plan to ingest data from this object.

Additional Information

Read the detailed Hevo documentation for the following related topics:

Source Considerations

Source Considerations

Help Scout restricts the number of API requests and access to certain API endpoints based on your Help Scout pricing plan. If Hevo exceeds the number of calls allowed by your plan, data ingestion is deferred until the limits are reset (approximately five minutes).

Refer to the following table for the applicable rate limits:

Help Scout Pricing Plan	Rate Limit
Standard	Up to 200 calls per minute
Plus	Up to 400 calls per minute
Company	Up to 800 calls per minute

Revision History

Refer to the following table for the list of key updates made to this page:

Date	Release	Description of Change
Dec-14-2022	NA	Updated section, Configuring Help Scout as a Source to reflect the latest Hevo UI.
Jul-12-2022	1.92	New document.

Help Scout

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