Help Scout AI Agent with Phone Support
Help Scout runs your email support; Wiredesk adds the phone. It answers a phone number of yours, along with website chat, email and WhatsApp, from your own content, and when a customer needs a person it opens a conversation in your Help Scout mailbox with its summary and the full transcript, tagged wiredesk. Help Scout needs an email address on every conversation, so on a call the agent asks for one first. You connect it with an app from Help Scout's My Apps.
What it does
Every conversation carries: The agent's summary of what the customer needs, who they are (name, email address and phone number, whichever it has), the channel it came in on, a link back to the conversation in Wiredesk, and the whole transcript with every line marked Customer, AI agent or Team.
By default it opens one when the customer asks for a person or wants to complain, or when it can't answer from your content, and it checks with them first unless they asked. You can replace that rule with your own, in plain words. Before it opens anything it finds out what actually went wrong, one question at a time, so the ticket never says the problem is unknown. The agent then gives the customer the ticket number and says the team will reply, without promising a time. In the chat widget a card under that reply shows the number and the summary.
It opens an active email conversation from the customer in the mailbox you choose, or your first mailbox if you leave that empty, so your team answers it from Help Scout by email.
The phone line is Wiredesk's: a local number you get in Wiredesk, or your existing line forwarded to it. The agent can also transfer a call live to a person if you set a handover number.
How to connect Help Scout
- In Help Scout, go to your profile → My Apps → Create My App. Any redirect URL will do. Copy the App ID and App secret.
- In Wiredesk, open the agent's Actions › Connections, click Connect on Help Scout and paste both. Add a mailbox ID to use a mailbox other than your first.
- Add a Helpdesk ticket action to the agent and pick Help Scout.
What happens on each channel
The same agent answers every channel from the same knowledge.
Website chat
The agent answers from your knowledge. When the customer needs a person it asks what went wrong, then for an email address unless it already has one, and opens the conversation with the summary and transcript. The customer sees the ticket number in the chat.
Phone
Help Scout needs the customer's email address on every conversation, so on a call the agent asks the caller for one before it opens it. The conversation isn't opened until it has one.
The customer's address is already known from the thread, so the agent opens the conversation without asking for it again.
An action that runs in chat runs on WhatsApp too. The agent asks for an email address, because that is where your team replies, and the conversation names WhatsApp as the channel.
What it doesn't do
- It is not a two-way sync. The agent opens the conversation and keeps its number and a link to it; it doesn't read your Help Scout queue, and what your team writes in Help Scout doesn't come back into Wiredesk.
- It opens conversations. It doesn't update, assign or close one afterwards.
- Every conversation is tagged wiredesk, so you can build a view or a routing rule for them.
- If Help Scout turns the conversation down, or doesn't answer within 8 seconds on a call (15 in writing), the agent offers to take a message instead and the connection's card shows Help Scout's reason.
- There is no conversation without the customer's email address, on any channel.
- Wiredesk doesn't put calls into Help Scout as phone conversations; a call that needs your team becomes an email conversation with the transcript.
Set it up
Questions about Wiredesk and Help Scout
Yes. Wiredesk answers a phone line, a local number from Wiredesk or your own line forwarded to it, and opens a Help Scout conversation with the call summary and transcript when the caller needs your team.