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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Project Management
Tickets we created from audit findings that haven’t been resolved yet.

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At a glance

Live count of HelpScout conversations that Vortex IQ created on your behalf from audit findings (broken checkout flows, refund spikes, performance regressions, ad-on-OOS, missing SEO fields) and which still sit in an unresolved state in the shared inbox. The merchant question this answers is: “how many revenue-protecting fixes have I asked HelpScout to triage that haven’t been picked up yet?” HelpScout calls these conversations, not tickets, but the merchant-facing meaning is the same.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Help Scout data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A US wellness DTC brand on Shopify running HelpScout Plus with three Mailboxes (hello@, wholesale@, returns@). The brand’s CS philosophy is “every customer email gets a human reply”; HelpScout was chosen because the shared-inbox model fits that ethos. Snapshot taken on 02 May 26 at 11:15 ET. The card reads 16. Three observations:
  1. The mailbox split mirrors how the team already works. HelpScout merchants tend to assign mailboxes to specific people, so 4 wholesale findings and 3 returns findings each have a natural owner. Surface a separate Vortex IQ panel per mailbox in the Nerve Centre; don’t try to drive triage across all 16 in one standup.
  2. All 16 conversations should appear in the shared-inbox view immediately. HelpScout’s “Inbox” view defaults to showing Active conversations sorted by most-recently-modified. Vortex IQ’s API-created conversations sit in this list with the vortex-iq tag visible inline. Train the team to triage by tag-color (set vortex-iq to red in Manage → Mailbox → Tags for visibility).
  3. HelpScout’s customer-centric reputation cuts both ways here. The shared-inbox model excels at high-touch consumer support but makes it easy for technical-debt findings to feel “out of place” in the inbox. Pair this card with shopify.refund_rate so the team sees Vortex IQ findings as protecting the customer experience, not as engineering ticket noise.
  4. The 4 wholesale findings are likely the highest absolute revenue impact. B2B pricing inconsistencies on a wholesale mailbox typically affect 5-figure orders. Cross-reference the wholesale account manager’s open quote pipeline; if any of those quotes touch the affected SKUs, those findings need same-day fixes.
  5. The card is unsmoothed and counts every Vortex IQ conversation regardless of which Mailbox it landed in. This is the source-of-truth view. For mailbox-level views use the per-mailbox sub-panels.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in HelpScout’s own dashboard:
Inbox view (secure.helpscout.net/conversations) with the tag filter vortex-iq and the default Active+Pending status filter. Saved Searches, build one for tag:vortex-iq AND status:active OR status:pending and share with the team. Reports → Conversations filtered by the same tag.
For multi-mailbox accounts, use the Mailbox switcher at the top to view per-mailbox; the API aggregates across all mailboxes by default. Why our number may legitimately differ from HelpScout’s view: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why does Vortex IQ’s number disagree with HelpScout Reports? Three usual culprits:
  1. Time zone. Reports honour the company timezone; agent UI honours each agent’s profile zone. The card uses company timezone for alerts.
  2. Eventual consistency. The HelpScout Conversations API has 5-30 second eventual consistency on newly-created conversations. If you just filed a finding, give it 30 seconds.
  3. Trash inclusion. UI views can show Trashed conversations for 30 days; the API excludes them entirely.
A finding has been Pending for two months. Does it count? Yes. Pending in HelpScout means “waiting for customer reply”; on a Vortex IQ ticket that usually means waiting on a developer or agency. The card counts it as open. Build a HelpScout Workflow to auto-reassign Pending Vortex IQ conversations after N days if you want movement enforced. Beacon’s auto-reply fired on a Vortex IQ conversation. Is it counted? Yes, until status moves to Closed. Beacon auto-replies do not change status. Add a Workflow that closes Vortex IQ conversations once Beacon confidence threshold is met if you want bot-handled findings to drop out. We run three Mailboxes (hello@, wholesale@, returns@). Do they all roll up? By default, yes. The connector token aggregates across every Mailbox it can read. To scope to a single Mailbox, set vortex_iq.mailbox_filter: <mailbox_id> in the connector config. HelpScout merchants typically prefer per-Mailbox panels because their team structure mirrors the mailbox structure. Open count just jumped, what should I check first? A 5-step playbook:
  1. Commerce platform first. Refund Rate, Cancellation Rate, Order Volume on Shopify / BigCommerce / Adobe. Refund spikes drive most audit findings.
  2. Site reliability. Datadog Operational Health Score, Sentry error rate. A bad deploy generates a tail of customer-facing errors.
  3. Catalogue. Catalogue Drift, Ads on OOS, Top Products. Pricing or stock changes shipped without QA flood the queue.
  4. Audit category mix. Filter by Vortex IQ tag (vortex-iq:checkout, vortex-iq:catalogue, vortex-iq:performance).
  5. Viral negative review or social mention. A bad TikTok or Trustpilot one-star spree drives 30+ tickets in an hour.
Why is today’s count so volatile? Today’s count includes everything filed in the last 24 hours plus everything still open from before. A morning audit run that files 10 findings will step the count up immediately; the card is unsmoothed by design. Response time vs resolution time, which one matters for findings? Resolution time. A Vortex IQ finding does not need a 30-minute first response; it needs to be triaged, prioritised, and closed within 7-14 days. Configure HelpScout’s Reports → Happiness Score and Reports → Productivity → Resolution Time with a tag filter for vortex-iq to track findings separately from consumer queries. We use HelpScout for transactional consumer queries AND Vortex IQ findings. Are they double-counted? No. The card filters strictly by tag. Consumer queries don’t carry the vortex-iq tag and are excluded. Multi-channel: do Beacon chat conversations count? Yes if they carry the vortex-iq tag. The card does not filter by type (api/email/chat); only by tag and status.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

VortexIQ Findings Open is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Help Scout and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.