5 Education Best Practices For Maximizing Help Scout

Through conversations with users in the education space, we see a few different ways those folks use Help Scout. Since every school or university is different we won't go into specifics here, but this can be used as a guide to point you in the right direction and spark ideas on what might work the best for your needs.

Saved Replies

Offering the same, consistent yet efficient support to anyone who emails you can go a long way to taking the best care of that student or parent. If you find yourself answering the same types of questions, saved replies can help you answer incoming emails without having to type out the same reply over and over. Create the reply once, and answer an email with just 3 clicks.

Examples:

Application response
Maintenance requests
Study abroad enquiries
Dining card questions
Waitlist information

Further reading: Create and manage saved replies for fast answers

Workflows

In Help Scout we call automations workflows, and they can be set up to either run automatically when certain conditions are met in Help Scout. With automatic workflows, you can think of them as If/Then statements. If one thing happens in Help Scout, these actions will automatically take place.

Manual workflows are especially helpful to use after reading an individual email, they can take many actions for you (e.g. add a tag, add a note, reply to the student, change the status of the email) all with one click.

Examples:

Look for subject or body keywords in an email to add a tag and assign an email to a specific person or Team (Explore Teams!)
If subject or body of email contains X keyword, move email to another inbox
Manage survey/questionnaire responses by tagging or setting custom fields based on the subject line
If email sender domain is X, then assign to Y teammate

Further reading: Get started with workflows / Automate your inbox

Custom Fields

Custom Fields and Tags are both great email tracking tools, but they have some nuances. Custom Fields are better for tracking things on every single conversation, like if you wanted to track and report on conversations by residence hall, email topic, or department.

Examples (you would set these on most/every single email you reply to):

Question type
Equipment status
Type of task
Graduating class

Further reading: Work with Custom Fields / Report on Custom Fields

Reporting

Using either tags or custom fields, you can set up reporting views that allow you to get an accurate view of the kinds of issues you are seeing weekly, monthly, or any other time frame you need.

We see folks in the education space setting up these kinds of reporting views:

Course purchased
Memberships
By Subject
IT Needed
Alumni/Prospective Student/Staff

Further reading: Understanding reports / Use views to filter reports