Feedback source
Turn Help Scout conversations into ranked product insight
The requests your support team answers one at a time are your clearest product signal. FeedbackFlow reads new conversations and ranks what keeps coming up.
Why connect Help Scout
- One webhook, no rules to maintain. Subscribe to Conversation Created and you are done.
- Customer threads only. Internal notes and your own replies are not ingested.
- Email address captured. Items are attributed to a real customer, so topics can be weighted by account value.
"Export keeps timing out on large projects, this is blocking our team."
Deduped and ranked alongside every other source.
How it works
- 1
Add a webhook
Manage, then Apps, then Webhooks in Help Scout.
- 2
Subscribe to Conversation Created
Paste the callback URL from the Help Scout card.
- 3
Watch it triage
New conversations become feedback items, grouped and ranked by AI.
Prefer the full walkthrough? Read the Help Scout setup guide.
Before you start
- A Help Scout account where you can add webhooks, which is an admin-level setting.
- A FeedbackFlow project. The free plan covers one, and no credit card is needed to finish this setup.
- A sense of your conversation volume. Every new conversation becomes an item, and items count toward your plan quota.
How to connect Help Scout to FeedbackFlow
- 1
Add the webhook
In Help Scout, go to Manage, then Apps, then Webhooks, and add one. Paste the callback URL from the Help Scout card in your FeedbackFlow project settings.
- 2
Subscribe to Conversation Created
This is the only event FeedbackFlow needs, and subscribing to more will not add anything: the extra deliveries arrive and are ignored, which costs you nothing but is worth knowing if you are watching the webhook log. Leave the other events unchecked so that log stays readable when you do need to debug something.
- 3
Copy the secret into FeedbackFlow
Paste the webhook secret into the Help Scout card and save. FeedbackFlow accepts either of the two schemes Help Scout has used: the older HMAC-SHA1 signature in x-helpscout-signature, and the shared-secret style their newer webhooks use. Both are verified, so you do not have to work out which one your account sends.
- 4
Create a test conversation
Email your Help Scout address from an outside account. The item should appear in FeedbackFlow within seconds, with the conversation subject as its first line and the HTML of the body converted to plain text.
The exact Request URL and any values you need to paste are shown on the Help Scout card inside your project settings, because they are specific to your project. Full Help Scout setup guide.
What FeedbackFlow reads from Help Scout
The customer's own thread, converted from HTML to text, plus the subject and the customer's email.
| Field | What FeedbackFlow does with it |
|---|---|
| _embedded.threads | The thread of type "customer" is used, falling back to the first thread. Internal notes are not chosen. |
| thread.body | The item's text. Help Scout sends HTML, which is stripped to plain text before triage. |
| subject | Prepended to the message, because a support subject line is often the clearest statement of the problem. |
| id | Deduplication key. |
| customer.email or primaryCustomer.email | Attribution and account matching, so topics can be weighted by customer value. |
What this looks like in practice
A teammate adds an internal note
Not ingested. The customer thread is selected specifically, so notes do not become feedback.
A customer's email is full of HTML formatting
Converted to plain text before triage, so the model reads the words rather than the markup.
Help Scout retries a delivery
Recognised by conversation id and discarded rather than duplicated.
Someone replies to an existing conversation
Nothing new is ingested. Only conversation creation is subscribed to.
Limits worth knowing
What this connector does not do, so you can find out here rather than after you have wired it up.
- Only new conversations are captured. A reply that adds the real detail to an existing conversation is not ingested, which is the sharpest limit of this connector.
- Attachments are not captured. A screenshot a customer sent stays in Help Scout.
- Help Scout tags, folders, and assignments are not read. Routing is done with FeedbackFlow's own rules.
- The HTML-to-text conversion is deliberately simple. Unusual markup may leave odd spacing, though it will not lose the words.
Frequently asked questions
- Why only new conversations and not replies?
- The webhook subscribes to Conversation Created, which is the one event that maps cleanly onto "a customer said something new". Subscribing to reply events as well would double-count long threads, because the same request restated in a follow-up would arrive as a second item. It does mean a conversation where the useful detail comes in message three is captured from message one, and that is a real limitation rather than a design flourish.
- Are internal notes ingested?
- No. The adapter looks specifically for the thread of type customer, so notes your team leaves for each other are not treated as feedback. If a conversation somehow has no customer thread at all, the first thread is used as a fallback, which in practice is still the customer's message.
- Which signature scheme does my account use?
- You do not need to know. FeedbackFlow tries the HMAC-SHA1 signature Help Scout has historically used and the shared-secret check their newer webhooks send, and accepts either. Both are verified against the secret you paste in, so this is convenience rather than a relaxation.
- Will this flood my quota?
- It depends on your support volume, and it is worth thinking about before turning it on. Every new conversation becomes an item, so a team handling two hundred conversations a week will use two hundred items a week. Items are never dropped when you hit a ceiling, they are held un-triaged until quota frees up, but the ranking will be incomplete while that lasts.
- Can I capture only some mailboxes?
- Help Scout webhooks are account-wide rather than per mailbox, so everything that creates a conversation is delivered. If you need a subset, the practical approach is a separate FeedbackFlow project for the mailbox you care about and routing rules to mute the rest, or Front instead, whose rule-based trigger filters at source. This is a genuine difference between the two connectors and worth weighing if you run several distinct inboxes.
- Does it matter that Help Scout sends HTML?
- Not for the result, but it is worth knowing what happens. Bodies arrive as HTML and are converted to plain text before triage, because a model reading markup wastes tokens on tags and sometimes classifies on them. The conversion is deliberately simple: it handles paragraphs, line breaks, and the common entities, and unusual markup may leave slightly odd spacing. It will not lose the words.
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