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Create a Help Scout conversation with Customer.io

Customer.io on Feb 13, 2018

If you don’t have a Help Scout account, you can create one here.

Get your Help Scout API key
  • Go to Your Profile (top right corner).
  • Select API Keys.
  • Click Generate an API Key.
  • Add a label to easily recognize the API key used inside Customer.io.

Please be aware that free plans don’t allow API access, and only owners and administrators are able to create API keys.

Get your Mailbox ID:
  • Open the mailbox where you want to create your conversations.
  • Go to Edit Mailbox (bottom left of the screen):
  • Copy the mailbox id from the URL. It will be something like:
https://secure.helpscout.net/settings/mailbox/[MAILBOX-ID]/
Create your campaign

Inside your Customer.io account, create a new campaign (event triggered or segment triggered depending on what should trigger the creation of a new conversation in Help Scout. In our example we’ll use the segment “Low NPS Rating” to target customers dissatisfied with our service.

Add a webhook action

Add a webhook action to your workflow, and give it a name. We’ll call our webhook “Low NPS Rating.”

After adding the webhook, click Add Request.

Compose your webhook

Next to POST add the Help Scout endpoint in this format:

https://[API-KEY]: @api.helpscout.net/v1/conversations.json

The result should look like:

https://7f7f8766b8a098b696c40a0c0e9034xXxXxXxXxX:X@api.helpscout.net/v1/conversations.json

At this point, you should see something like this:

Customize your webhook body

Grab the sample JSON content from https://gist.github.com/LiviaSarban/2e0b200f85926dc13f8e6922046c52e9.

Replace MAILBOX-ID with your own and adapt any attributes to your own data.

customer, subject, mailbox, and threads are mandatory fields. The rest are optional. You can read more about the options here: http://developer.helpscout.net/help-desk-api/conversations/create/

Our webhook body now looks something like this:

Send Request

Press Send Request to send a test webhook to your Help Scout mailbox.

If everything went well, you should see a 201 Created result.

Success!

Our new conversation was created in Help Scout!

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