Beacon Jumpstart Guide

Excited to get up and running with Beacon? Right on! Watch the video below to get a feel for all of the cool things Beacon can do, or head to your account to get started with Beacon right away: Login to get started. 

Follow these 5 quick and easy steps to create your first Beacon!

1. Launch the Beacon Builder

Use the visual Beacon Builder to design an embeddable widget that matches the look and feel of your website. Choose a color to match your site — enter an exact HEX code to perfectly blend — and even customize the text labels to capture your brand voice.

Check out Create a New Beacon for the step-by-step guide. 

2. Choose the best way to serve with Beacon modes

Your customer just needs a quick answer and is happy to find it themselves? There’s no need to chat from the Beacon on your returns page, but you’re happy to chat on the pricing page?

Create one or many Beacons to help your customers and satisfy your goals, and pair them with Beacon modes to show the most relevant content right off the bat. You can:

Be helpful with Docs

Suggest just a few relevant articles tailored to your page URL and you’ll be amazed how many customers may just go ahead and help themselves. Read more about Suggested Content in  Manage Docs Settings.

Where you want to encourage self-service the most, embed a Beacon with Self-Service mode enabled. Customers will see your help articles first, and can only contact you once they've interacted with your help content.

Chat it Up

Let your customers start a chat with you when they need immediate assistance from your team. When talking to a customer is most important, the Ask First mode will fit the bill perfectly. It prompts Beacon to open directly in the Ask tab, and customers see your contact options before anything else.

Don’t worry, though. Help Scout makes sure customers can only see the chat option when there’s somebody available on your team to meet their high chat expectations.

• Follow these steps to set up chat for one of your Beacons.
• Each team member can set the maximum number of chats they feel they can effectively manage at a time. 
• Coach team members to keep their chat availability up to date.

An email is worth a thousand words

Nobody available to chat at the moment? Perhaps a customer would prefer to communicate with you asynchronously, or your team just isn’t ready for chat. No problem. Beacon still supports good ol’ email messaging in every Beacon mode. Check out the options here.

3. Setup some customer smarts

With a little bit of JavaScript and the Beacon JS API, you can make your Beacon smarter for your customer and more informative for your team. 

• Use the Advanced Security features to show customers their full support history in the Beacon. 
• Pre-fill the Beacon message form fields with known values — like their name and email address — to save your customers some keystrokes. 
• Do you have customer details in your homegrown apps that would be helpful to see as you are answering chats or messages? You can use the Beacon Identify method to sync customer property data.

4. Load the Beacon on your site

Once you’ve got your Beacon just the way you want it, it’s time to copy the embed code to your website. Good news! With Beacon you can continue to tweak your Beacon in Help Scout and all updates will be automatically reflected on your website as they are saved. 

5. Get to chatting!

Head over to Chat With Customers to learn more about the actual chat process.