First-party app
Help Scout

Help Scout

Manage Help Scout conversations, customers and mailboxes.

stable Customer Support

About

Help Scout ships in the w6w first-party pack. It declares 13 actions, 2 health checks, and the host runs its code in a sandbox that never sees the credential.

App id
io.w6w.helpscout
Version
0.1.2
Author
w6w
Licence
MIT
Categories
Customer Support

Overview

Help Scout is a shared-inbox help desk, and this app manages the conversations, customers, and mailboxes behind it: listing and reading conversations, replying to a customer or leaving an internal note, and updating a conversation’s status, assignee, or mailbox. It is built for workflows that need to act on support tickets — routing, triaging, or replying — rather than just observing them.

Customer records can be created, read, updated, and searched, so a workflow can keep customer details in sync with another system or look someone up before replying on their behalf. Conversations and customers both support partial updates — changing just a status or a handful of fields — without having to resend the whole record, and the mailbox and tag lists round out the reference data other actions depend on, such as knowing which mailbox to file a new conversation into.

Build with Help Scout

Three routes to the same 13 actions. The Workflow tab is generated from Help Scout's own manifest and carries its real ids, so it is copy-pasteable; the Code and CLI examples are the same call for any action on any app, so every app-specific value in them is a blank you fill in.

Add Note to Conversation

add-note

Add an internal note, visible to agents but never sent to the customer.

Reply to Conversation

add-reply

Add a reply thread to a conversation, published to the customer.

Create Conversation

create-conversation

Start a new conversation in an inbox, with a first message from the customer.

Create Customer

create-customer

Create a customer record.

Get Conversation

get-conversation

Fetch a single conversation by ID.

Get Current User

get-current-user

Fetch the Help Scout user this connection authenticates as.

Get Customer

get-customer

Fetch a single customer by ID.

List Conversations

list-conversations

List and filter conversations. Defaults to active conversations, newest first.

List Customers

list-customers

List and filter customers. Defaults to newest first.

List Inboxes

list-mailboxes

List every inbox (mailbox) on the account.

List Tags

list-tags

List every tag used across all inboxes, alphabetically.

Update Conversation

update-conversation

Change one field on a conversation: subject, status, owner, inbox or customer.

Update Customer

update-customer

Change one or more top-level fields on a customer. Fields left blank are untouched.

A workflow step names the app and the action, and the editor fills in the connection when you pick one. This is the Step shape from the workflow spec, carrying Help Scout's real ids.

{
  "manifestVersion": "2",
  "name": "helpscout-example",
  "steps": [
    {
      "id": "add-note",
      "uses": {
        "app": "io.w6w.helpscout",
        "action": "add-note",
        "connection": "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID"
      },
      "with": {
        "conversationId": "<conversationId>",
        "text": "<text>"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Here are some of the things you can do

  • Add Note to Conversation

    perform
    add-note
  • Reply to Conversation

    perform
    add-reply
  • Create Conversation

    perform
    create-conversation
  • Create Customer

    perform
    create-customer
  • Get Conversation

    read
    get-conversation

+8 more actions available

Every app-specific value here is a blank you have to fill in. An app action is reached through the connection that authenticates it, so the address is a connection id, not the app id — and connections belong to your account, so a public page cannot know yours. Create one for Help Scout, then fill in the three blanks: conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID, the action key, and the parameters that action declares. The call itself is real — the shape is transcribed from the studio's own snippet builder, which prints the same kind of blanks — but nothing in it is specific to Help Scout. The Workflow tab is where this app's real ids are.

Install
npm install @w6w/sdk
yarn add @w6w/sdk
pnpm add @w6w/sdk
deno add npm:@w6w/sdk
Code
import { W6wClient, isActionRun } from "@w6w/sdk";

// Reads W6W_BASE_URL and W6W_TOKEN from the environment when omitted.
const client = new W6wClient();

const envelope = await client.run({
  urn: "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID",
  action: "create-conversation",
  payload: {
    mailboxId: "<value>",
    subject: "<value>",
    // type: "<value>",
    // status: "<value>",
    customerEmail: "<value>",
    // customerFirstName: "<value>",
    // customerLastName: "<value>",
    initialMessage: "<value>",
    // assignTo: "<value>",
    // tags: "<value>",
    // autoReply: "<value>",
    // imported: "<value>",
  },
});

if (isActionRun(envelope)) console.log(envelope.value);
Install the CLI
npm install -g @w6w/cli
CLI
w6w run conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID --action create-conversation --payload '{"mailboxId":"<value>","subject":"<value>","customerEmail":"<value>","initialMessage":"<value>"}'

Give an AI agent Help Scout — without giving it Help Scout's credentials. One MCP endpoint exposes every app, function and workflow the caller is entitled to, as tools it can discover and run. Access is granted per team while we onboard.

One tool call
{
  "name": "w6w_invoke",
  "arguments": {
    "ref": "app:io.w6w.helpscout#add-note",
    "input": {
      "conversationId": "<conversationId>",
      "text": "<text>"
    }
  }
}

Every tool names its target with a single ref. The app: form above doesn't name a connection at all — the host resolves which of the caller's Help Scout connections to sign with, and refuses rather than guesses when the answer is ambiguous.

What the agent gets

Credentials it can't read

The token is attached host-side, at the moment of the call. It is never a tool argument, never in the model's context, and never in a transcript — so a prompt injection has nothing to exfiltrate.

A tool surface scoped to the caller

Tools are derived per end user from what that person has actually connected and is entitled to — not one shared bot identity carrying the union of everyone's access.

A durable workflow in one call

Multi-step work runs on the workflow engine and returns a run handle the agent can poll — retries, branching and state survive the conversation that started them.

Health-aware discovery

Help Scout's declared health checks are on the surface too, so an agent can tell "the vendor is down" from "your credential expired" before it burns a retry on either.

The MCP surface is part of the hosted platform. Help Scout itself is MIT, and the runtime that executes it is source-available (FSL).

Request MCP access

Health checks

Help Scout declares its own checks, so its health is a property of the app rather than something the host guesses at.

service

Help Scout platform status

Atlassian Statuspage rollup for status.helpscout.com, with per-component detail. Unauthenticated and unsigned.

quota

API rate-limit headroom

Per-minute account allowance remaining, read off the `X-RateLimit-*-Minute` headers on the whoami probe.