Mixpanel

Mixpanel is an advanced analytics platform that enables web and mobile applications to measure any action, connect each action to a real person and leverage the data to provide customers with a better experience. If you have a question about your users, Mixpanel can give you an answer.    

Help Scout's Mixpanel App brings your People data into the customer sidebar. When a customer sends you an email, this app will pull in their Mixpanel profile, add a link to view that profile in full and also display up to 10 recent actions they took on your website or in your app. This information instantly makes your support team more efficient and able to provide outstanding service. Here's a snapshot of what it will look like in Help Scout:

In addition, the app can also track Help Scout customer email activity and Docs browsing activity as events in Mixpanel. On the Mailbox side of things, we'll log the following four events to Mixpanel: 

1. Customer starts a new conversation
2. Help Scout user responds to the customer
3. Customer replies to an existing conversation
4. Help Scout user closes the conversation

You can also choose to sync the following four Docs browsing events to Mixpanel as well: 

1. Unique site visits
2. Article views
3. Site searches
4. Customer contact form submissions

Logging these events set the foundation for some really great reports in Mixpanel. You can start to quantify things like cost, agent productivity and tie those metrics to specific properties that are unique to your own business.

Activation instructions 

1

Log in to your Mixpanel account and click on the Account link seen in the top menu bar.

2

Select the Projects tab from the modal that pops-up. Decide which project you want to track in Help Scout, then copy the Token, API Key and API Secret to a text document. 

3

Take note of the URL seen in your address bar. You'll need to either copy the full URL, or remember the numbers seen after /report. In the example below, we'll want to remember 417835.

4

Hop over to Help Scout and  install the Mixpanel app. Paste in your API Key, API Secret and Token, followed by your Project ID, which is the number referenced in the previous step. Select which customer events you'd like the app to track, and the mailboxes you'd like to connect. Don't forget to hit Save. 

Managing customer creation

Help Scout's Mixpanel integration uses the customer's email address as the  distinct_id when sending events.

• If you are creating your own users in Mixpanel via some other process:
  You should use the customer's email address as the distinct_id. This approach will ensure that both your own process and the Mixpanel integration will be using the same value for the distinct_id and that no duplicates will be created.
• If you are recording events before you have access to a customer's email address:
  You can initially use the random distinct_id supplied by the Mixpanel client. Once the email address is available to you, you can issue an alias command from within your own process to link the random distinct_id to the email address. Your process may then begin using the email address as the distinct_id. This will preserve the customer's history while continuing to keep both processes in sync.