AI Drafts

NEW AI drafts allows your team to leverage the power of OpenAI's GPT-4 to generate replies to your customers in a draft state, learning from previous conversations and Docs articles in your Help Scout account. In one click, you'll have a high-quality draft ready to review, revise if needed, and send.

Take a look at AI Drafts Billing and Pricing to learn how the billing for this feature works for accounts on a user-based billing plan. AI drafts is included with our contact-based billing plans.

AI drafts is available to all users on current Standard, Plus, and Pro plans.

Enable or Disable AI Drafts

Free Trial

Once an Inbox has more than 100 past conversation replies, a free trial of the AI drafts feature will be automatically enabled within your account on user-based plans. During this special trial period, users across your account will be able to try the feature right in the Inbox reply editor.

Users must be in the Inbox and have the Reply to Conversation permission to be able to generate an AI draft.

The free feature trial includes AI drafts on 100 unique conversations.

When your free AI drafts trial has ended, Account Owners and any users that have the Manage billing and plan changes permission will be able to enable and manage the billing settings to continue using AI drafts. See Account Wide below for the steps to access those settings.

To turn AI drafts off during the trial period, just disable the feature for each Inbox. See Per Inbox below for the steps to do that.

Account Wide

Account Owners and any users that have the Manage billing and plan changes permission can access these settings. See User Roles and Permissions for more help there.

Head to Your Plan > AI Drafts and toggle the switch under Enable AI Drafts to on or off across your entire account and all Inboxes.

See Manage AI Drafts below for more information on the other settings here.

Account Owners will find an application called "AI Drafts Connection" in Your Profile > My Apps. Do not delete this, as it is necessary for the AI Drafts feature.

Per Inbox

Head to Manage > Inbox(es) > [Choose Your Inbox] > AI Drafts to enable or disable AI drafts in each Inbox.

See Per Inbox Options below for more about the other settings you'll find here.

Use AI Drafts

Click the AI draft quick link in the reply box to generate a draft. A modal will appear with the draft and the prompt to refine it if needed.

Help Scout users can review and revise the draft as needed before sending, just like any other draft.

Note: If you don’t see the AI draft quick link, it means there isn't enough data to index in your account. You'll need about 100 conversation replies to start generating drafts.

Enter Prompts to Use AI to Refine the Draft

Generate a draft using AI, and you'll see an option to improve the draft by using a custom prompt. This is your chance to tell the AI to add or remove something to the draft, change the tone, change the language, or even have it start over with a new approach.

Experiment with different prompts to see different results. You can always use the original draft or any subsequent versions to choose to insert those — you don't have to use the most recent draft generated. Just scroll back up in the list of options and choose Insert under the draft you wish you use.

Pro-tip: Keep in mind that with this prompt you are talking to the AI directly, so you'll need to be specific to get the results you're looking for, and it may take a little try and try again energy to find the right words. If you've never talked to one of the large language model AIs before, think of it as talking to someone who is very literal and sometimes will not understand what you mean, so you may need to clarify things multiple times.

Below are a few tips and tricks for prompts you can try, but it's worth noting that your results may vary even with these suggestions, as working with AI is still very much an evolving technology.

Ask For Additional Information

If you want to use the original draft the AI offers, but add an additional ask for information, try starting your prompt with "also ask" and provide the additional questions to the AI. If you just tell it to ask other questions without specifying that you want to ask these in addition to the original, it is likely to replace the first draft with a new one, only asking the new questions.

Provide Additional Information

The AI may not include all of the things that you would in a response. Try prompting it to "also tell them" additional information to append to the response. If you just tell it to give the additional information, that may be all the new draft will include, so including the word also in your prompt is important.

Translate to a Different Language

In most cases, the draft will match the language of the customer's email. To translate the draft to a different language, you can say "translate that to [language]". This prompt should work with any languages that OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 supports. Note: You may see unexpected behavior with RTL languages, so proceed with caution for those.

Use Workflows to Generate AI Drafts

Create an automatic workflow that uses the action Generate an AI draft, and any conversations that match your criteria will land in your queue with an draft ready for your team to work with.

More about automatic workflows here: Automatic Workflows

For example, typically you'll have the same process for damaged orders in most cases, so AI Drafts can handle that question for you, no problem. Set your workflow to look for conversations that contain both the word order and the word damaged and have it generate a draft using AI to give your team a quick head start on that conversation.

Set the workflow to generate an AI draft on only the first email from the customer in the conversation by selecting On the first conversation thread when defining the action. Set it to reply to every customer email in the conversation by selecting For each subsequent thread.

Use that action in a manual workflow to make it one of several actions your team can take at once.

More about manual workflows here: Manual Workflows

We'll use damaged order inquiries as our example again, but maybe you have one person on your team that deals with orders damaged by shipper ABC and another team member that handles orders damaged by shipper XYZ, and you want the reply to come from the right team member for the shipper, but it's something someone will have to look up.

Create a manual workflow for each shipper, and then when that conversation comes in, the person who first gets it looks up the shipper, runs the manual workflow for that shipper, and it assigns it to the right team member with a draft.

Manage AI Drafts

Per Inbox Options

We offer a few AI draft settings that can be uniquely configured for each Inbox. Head to Manage > Inbox(es) > [Choose Your Inbox] > AI Drafts to change these settings.

Account Owners and Administrators with permissions to an Inbox can manage these settings.

The Enable AI Drafts toggle determines whether a specific Inbox does, or does not have access to the AI drafts feature.

Writing Style

Choose the Greeting and Closing you want to show in the AI-generated drafts within this Inbox.

Choose from the following options for the greeting:

Auto: The AI will choose a greeting based on past conversation data.
Hi (name),: Always begin the conversation with Hi and the first name of the customer per their customer profile.
Hello (name),: Always begin the conversation with Hello and the first name of the customer per their customer profile.
No greetings: Skip a greeting.
Custom: Define your own greeting. Insert (name) in the greeting to use the first name of the customer from their customer profile.

Choose from the following options for the closing:

Auto: The AI will choose a closing based on past conversation data.
Best,: Always close the reply with Best,.
Best regards,: Always close the reply with Best Regards,.
No closing: Skip a closing.
Custom: Define your own closing. Insert (name) in the closing to use the first name of the customer from their customer profile.

Data Sources

Enable Docs content to improve the quality and accuracy of AI-generated drafts in each Inbox. Toggle this on to allow the AI to use your Docs content in addition to past replies to generate the AI drafts.

Select Docs site(s)

Choose any or all of your Docs sites.

Billing Options and Enable or Disable the Feature for All Inboxes

This section applies to user-based billing plans only. AI drafts is included with contact-based plans.

Head to Your Plan and find the AI Drafts entry in your plan breakdown. Click the link that shows Up to [number] conversations there to review settings or make changes.

Account Owners and any users that have the Manage billing and plan changes permission can access these settings. See User Roles and Permissions for more help there.

AI Drafts Options

Current Tier

This section displays the tier of billing your account is currently on as well as how many conversations have used an AI draft so far in the billing period.

Enable AI Drafts

Toggle Enable AI Drafts off here to disable the feature.

Spending Limits

Choose whether you'd like to automatically upgrade to the next tier if you reach the billing limit or set a hard limit that will stop drafts from being generated after it's reached each cycle. See AI Drafts Pricing and Billing for more information.