How Hightouch Scaled to over 300+ Customer Slack Channels

Challenge

Hightouch prides themselves in their great customer experience. Their enterprise and strategic customers and an increasing number of their scaled customers have shared Slack channels with Hightouch.

Customers LOVE Slack. It’s easy for them to pop into the channel and ask questions and it keeps them highly engaged with Hightouch. We are able to connect and tackle issues together in Slack like we are on the same team.

Teresa Nesteby Head of Success Engineering

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Sounds like unicorns and rainbows right? Hightouch's customers have a better experience and retain significantly better in Slack, but it was becoming too operationally intensive to offer Slack channels to more customers.

• Teresa's team was spending hours everyday context switching between Slack and Intercom and trying to monitor channels and catch and follow up on all their customers' questions.
• Data from conversations in Slack was not feeding into all the workflows and reporting Teresa's team had already setup and relied on in Intercom.
• There was a lack of visibility for Hightouch's other stakeholders, becoming difficult and noisy to loop in engineering and impossible to keep sales informed on active issues during POC
• Teresa needed data to justify her team's impact even though she KNEW they were shepherding the post-sales experience for lots of customers

Results

• 75% increase in rate of customers self-serving into support from Slack, leaving Teresa's team time freed from closely monitoring channels for support questions
• 100% of support questions routed to a single queue for Hightouch's success engineering team
• 100 hours / month saved in finding and tracking customer questions across Slack channels
• Consolidated and out-of-the-box metrics like first response time, resolution time, issue volume, and more from Slack conversations
• Visibility for all stakeholders on support issues from wherever they live

Solution: Enable End-to-end Customer Ops with Pylon

Hightouch partnered with Pylon in order to greatly improve their operational efficiency and continue to serve their customers where they live - all without changing their own workflows.

Pylon helps Teresa's team to scale all their workflows without introducing yet another tool they have to visit. Internal stakeholders and customers like product and engineering can continue to live in Slack, and support can scale out in the system meant for them.

Behind-the-scenes, Pylon bidirectionally syncs data between Slack and Intercom in realtime - allowing Teresa's team to live in Intercom to answer customer questions across their entire customer base.

Pylon feels super organic, customers don't know we aren't in channel but we can connect and collaborate super easily.  There are efficiency gains to have all tickets flow to one queue - absolutely impactful to CSE.
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Teresa Nesteby Head of Success Engineering

Previously when support question came in, the team would need to notice the question, manually tag, and forward it to the support system. To reduce the need for a middleman, Hightouch now uses Pylon's AI features where customers are prompted to self-serve into support when they ask support questions. Hightouch saw a 75% increase in issues created via customers that were previously manually filed, monitored, and tracked in Slack by Teresa's team.

Teresa now gets all her existing workflows to work out-of-the-box on Slack conversations.

• Unified system to work out of and maintain full history in (Intercom)
• SLA tracking on Slack conversations
• Reporting & analytics on all core support metrics

Teresa and her team use this to understand staffing needs, demonstrate value at renewal time, and continue to deliver a great experience to their customers.

I highly, highly recommend Pylon.  Pylon has quickly become one of the essential tools in our support toolkit that I would not go without.  It has made Slack support as easy as email support. 🤯  Something previously reserved for just a handful of a company’s largest customers due to bandwidth limitations can now easily scale to more customers.

Teresa Nesteby Head of Success Engineering

Book a demo to learn more about how Pylon can bring operational efficiency to meeting your customers where they live.