AddThisFeature

Help Scout Conversation Creation

Turn an in-app help request into a Help Scout conversation in the right mailbox.

moderate Sales & Marketing Tools

What it adds

A submission path that opens a Help Scout conversation with the customer, mailbox, tags, and assignee already set correctly.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Resolve the customer from the authenticated session and match on that address exactly. Do not create a customer from a free-text field the user can type, and do not read a matched customer's history back into the app.

  2. 2

    Make the destination mailbox, tag set, and default assignee configurable per request type, and validate the chosen mailbox when the configuration is saved rather than discovering it is gone at submission time.

  3. 3

    Preserve what the user actually wrote: line breaks, ordering, and any quoted error text. Send it in a form the provider renders faithfully instead of collapsing the whole message into one paragraph.

  4. 4

    Carry a request identifier generated before the first attempt through every retry, and deliver through the app's existing background-job system so retry and backoff behaviour is the one the app already has.

  5. 5

    If Zendesk or Freshdesk briefs are also applied here, exactly one of them owns the user-facing form, the context capture, and the deduplication. This brief supplies only the Help Scout mapping and delivery on top of that shared path.

Edge cases it handles

8
  • Matching a customer by email must not leak: the matched record's existing conversations must never be shown back to whoever submitted the form.
  • A mailbox that was archived, deleted, or lost permission must fall back to a configured default and raise an operator alert rather than dropping the request on the floor.
  • An assignee who has left the team must not silently swallow the conversation into a dormant inbox. Fall back to unassigned so the queue picks it up.
  • Attachment metadata — original filename, type, and size — must survive the transfer, or agents receive a wall of unnamed binaries they cannot triage.
  • A retry after a timeout must be matched on the request identifier, because the first attempt may have created the conversation before the response was lost.
  • Rate limits and provider outages must queue the request with bounded backoff, and the user must be told their message was received rather than shown a provider failure.
  • User-supplied text must be escaped before it is placed into rendered content, so a message containing markup cannot alter formatting or embed a link the sender did not write.
  • The conversation identifier must be stored against the app record so a later reply threads onto the same conversation.

Definition of done

9
  • A request creates a conversation in the mailbox configured for that request type.
  • The customer is resolved from the session and no matched history is exposed back into the app.
  • Message formatting and attachment metadata arrive intact.
  • A retried submission produces exactly one conversation.
  • A missing, archived, or inaccessible mailbox falls back to a default and alerts an operator.
  • Provider downtime queues the request and the user still receives a clear confirmation.
  • The conversation reference is stored against the app record.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.