Help Scout integration

When you connect to Help Scout, we sync your contacts (people), companies (organizations), conversations, and knowledge base articles. You can leverage Ortto’s powerful campaign, reporting, and dashboard features on your customer data from Help Scout.

Help Scout prerequisites

This integration process requires having a Help Scout account for which you have administrative permission to install apps.

It is also a requirement that the Help Scout account you are connecting is on a paid plan (not a free plan) to ensure that conversation data can be successfully synced to Ortto.

Connect from Ortto

To connect to Help Scout:



1. On the Data sources page, click New data source.
2. Under Customer support or All data sources, select Help Scout, then Get started.
3. On the Connect to Help Scout page:
   1. At Opt-in permission, select the checkboxes to automatically opt-in all your Help Scout contacts to email and/or SMS. By doing so, you confirm that your contacts have given consent to be opted-in to these subscriptions.
   2. At Data retention, select to either:
      • store only the last 90 days of activity data, or
      • select the time frame for the data stored, and the activities which will be stored.
   3. If needed, select Advanced options to:
      • Choose which CDP fields can be modified from the Help Scout data source, or
      • Choose not to modify CDP data fields that already have a value.
        You also have the option to automatically archive records in Ortto when they are deleted in Help Scout.
4. Click Next then sign in to your Help Scout account.
   Click Authorize to allow Ortto to connect to Help Scout.
5. On the Merge page, select the appropriate strategy by which people’s (customers') data is merged from Help Scout into your Ortto’s CDP.
6. Click Done to exit the setup.

How is the data merged into Ortto?

Data is merged from Help Scout to Ortto on the initial connection. Subsequently, newly modified objects are synced when they occur, as the connection is based on webhooks.

The Help Scout integration is initially configured as read only, which means that no data is sent from Ortto to Help Scout.

When a person is added to your CDP from the Help Scout data synchronization, if they do not already exist as a contact in your CDP, they are added as a new contact. New contacts will have their email and SMS subscription permissions set according to the selection you made when you connected Help Scout to Ortto. For example, if you selected to opt-in your contacts to email and SMS communications, then new users added to Ortto will inherit the same permissions.

Initial data sync

Data associated with Help Scout objects are merged into the Ortto CDP.

Ongoing data sync

The Help Scout data sync is based on webhooks so data will be synced to Ortto shortly after an activity occurs.

Resynchronizing data

Help Scout data is resynchronized when the data source is reconnected and when the data retention limits are adjusted. The resync will not perform a full backfill of data, it will only import changes that occurred since the last Ortto request for Help Scout data.

A resync of the Help Scout data may affect the audiences and campaigns within the CDP by resetting the attributes for the person, and activities, causing a person to potentially re-enter an audience or campaign within the CDP.

What does the data source add to my account?

The Help Scout data source adds:

• Help Scout customer records and their associated fields to your CDP, known as people or contacts in Ortto.
• In some cases, however, it may be necessary to store an activity and its attribute data for longer. Therefore, Ortto provides a mechanism for customers on selected Ortto plans to opt-in to selectively store their activity data for longer. Learn more about data retention under Configuring data retention.
• The ability to use Liquid syntax in campaign messages to personalize your messages using merge tags for Help Scout person and organization fields, and activity attributes. Learn more about using Liquid syntax under Personalizing campaign content with Liquid.

View Help Scout fields in your CDP

Customize your CDP field visibility and add Help Scout fields by clicking the cog icon, then select or clear the fields you want to show or hide. Help Scout fields are indicated with the small Help Scout icon.

Access the Help Scout data source view

When a data source is connected, you are provided with a data source view. On the Data sources page, click the data source you wish to view.

A data source’s view is the administration page where you can:

• view and manage the data source in the left-hand details panel, and
• under the relevant tabs on the right-hand side, view:
  • an Overview of the data source,
  • an Activity feed, and
  • an Audience table, which displays the people imported from Help Scout.

In the details panel, you can give the data source a new name (this will not affect your Help Scout account settings). To do so, hover over the name and click the pencil icon, then type the new name and click on a blank area of the page to save the name. You can also disconnect the data source, and edit:

• whether to modify system CDP fields,
• the merge strategy, and
• the data retention period.

Learn more about the data source view under Managing data sources.

Using Help Scout

Integrating Help Scout with Ortto allows you to import your existing customer data, and conversation, chat and rating activity data.

When you import your Help Scout data into Ortto, you can:

• Use Help Scout contact and conversation data to create highly-customized filters to find specific segments of people for campaigns and audiences. For example, create a filter to trigger a customer’s entry into a journey to receive a detailed customer service survey after the customer’s conversation has been closed.
• Use Help Scout conversation data to create reports and dashboards to capture metrics like new number of conversations, number of closed conversations, conversation ratings by team member, number of conversations assigned to a particular team member or mailbox, conversation subjects relating to a particular word or phrase, and so on.
• Create campaigns to educate customers about specific topics or features based on conversation data. For example, you are a tertiary education provider and you receive a large number of enquiries about your MBA program. You could use conversation subject and tag data to create playbook with a series of messages to provide information about the program to prospective students.

Troubleshooting Help Scout

This troubleshooting guide is designed to help you with common questions or issues you may encounter when using Help Scout as a data source.

For further assistance, please contact our Support team:

1. In the left-hand navigation drawer of your Ortto account, click Support.
2. On the How can we help? page:
   1. Under Quick links, click Chat with support.
   2. Type your message in the Talk messenger widget to start a conversation with our team.

Disconnect and delete the data source

You must disconnect and archive a data source before you can delete it.

Disconnecting a data source from Ortto will stop new data from the data source merging with the CDP.

Learn about disconnecting, archiving and deleting a data source under Managing data sources.

Data source already connected

Disconnect, archive, and delete the existing Help Scout connection before attempting to connect again; the existing data source must be deleted.

Connect more than one Help Scout account

Ortto can connect to only one Help Scout account at a time. To connect to another Help Scout account, you must first disconnect and delete the data source for the current Help Scout account.