How Help Scout Moved From Traditional SaaS To An AI-Native Product Company: A Conversation with Nick Francis & Luis Morales of Help Scout
Jan 6, 2025
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Nick Francis, CEO of Help Scout, and Luis Morales, VP of Engineering, dive into their journey transforming a 13-year-old customer support platform into an AI-first company. They discuss their shift from skepticism to embracing AI for enhancing customer experiences. The duo shares insights on experimenting with AI features, evolving business models, and the challenges of prompt engineering. They emphasize the importance of an experimentation-driven culture and the new role of AI product quality experts, offering valuable advice for companies navigating AI integration.
Help Scout successfully shifted its focus from skepticism to embracing AI, integrating it to enhance customer experiences rather than merely automate tasks.
The company overhauled its business model to charge based on customer interactions, fostering accessibility to support tools and promoting a customer-centric ethos.
Deep dives
Transitioning to AI-Native Business Model
Help Scout has transformed from a non-AI-native company to integrating artificial intelligence as a core component of its product offerings. The shift involved not only adopting AI technologies but also redefining the business model to adapt to the changing landscape where generative AI plays a pivotal role. As AI started to become accessible for all customer segments, Help Scout pivoted its focus to harness AI for improving customer experiences rather than using it for deflection or merely automating tasks. This transition demonstrates the importance of understanding AI's capabilities and limitations and using that understanding to create delightful experiences for customers.
The Importance of Customer-Centric Culture
Help Scout has built its foundation on creating customer-centric experiences, a value that is critical as the company integrates AI into its product offerings. The leadership firmly believes that customer support should not be seen merely as a cost center but rather as a growth driver, with satisfied customers acting as powerful marketing tools. This philosophy led Help Scout to democratize access to customer interactions, ensuring that all employees are engaged with customer feedback, thereby fostering a culture of empathy and responsiveness. By prioritizing customer voices throughout the organization, Help Scout is working toward meaningful interactions and innovative solutions that truly benefit their clientele.
Innovating Through Team Collaboration and Experimentation
The engineering team at Help Scout adopted a culture of experimentation to effectively integrate AI into their products, leading to innovative solutions like automated drafts and summaries. Understandably, this shift posed challenges as engineers had to adapt from traditional software practices to a more fluid, trial-and-error approach. They embraced learning from mistakes and sought insights from various sources, including research papers and community input, to refine their implementations. This focus on collaboration resulted in significant initiatives that improved internal processes and increased customer satisfaction through enhanced support interactions.
Redefining Value Metrics and Business Strategy
Help Scout undertook a significant overhaul of its business model to align its pricing strategy with the value provided to customers, moving away from a traditional per-seat model. By charging based on the number of customer interactions rather than individual user accounts, Help Scout made it possible for all employees to engage with customer support without the barrier of additional costs. This model not only supports their customer-centric mission but enables broad access to AI tools within the platform. This strategic alignment allows Help Scout to offer innovative features without added fees, effectively fostering a more inclusive ecosystem for its users while positioning the company for future growth.
In this episode of Deployed: The AI Product Podcast, we talk with Nick Francis, CEO and Co-founder, and Luis Morales, VP of Engineering at Help Scout, about their journey integrating AI into their established (13 years in market!) customer support platform.
Nick and Luis share candid insights on:
• How they shifted from skepticism about AI to embracing it as a tool for delighting customers • Their process for experimenting with AI features, from summarization to automated email drafts • Challenges in prompt engineering and building effective RAG systems • Creating a new role for an AI product quality expert with deep customer knowledge • Transitioning to an experimentation-driven engineering culture • Making the bold decision to completely overhaul their business model and pricing
The conversation covers both high-level strategy and tactical details of Help Scout's AI development process. Nick and Luis offer valuable perspectives for any company looking to thoughtfully integrate AI capabilities into existing products.For product and engineering leaders navigating the complexities of AI adoption, this episode provides practical advice on balancing innovation with customer needs. Tune in to learn how Help Scout is leveraging AI to enhance the customer support experience while staying true to their values.
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