Customer-First Teams Thrive in Uncertain Times
Economic slowdowns. Shifting customer behavior. Budget cuts. Whether you're a startup founder or scaling your support team, moments of uncertainty ask everyone to rethink norms. But these same moments can also spark creative approaches to building businesses that last.
At Help Scout, we’ve seen firsthand how teams that prioritize customers are better equipped to weather change. Here are a few principles we’ve learned from the best of them to help you navigate today’s uncertainty.
Double down on relationship building
When things get unpredictable, the instinct is often to do more with less — to automate, scale back, or streamline wherever possible. And while efficiency matters, don’t lose sight of what customers really want: to be seen and heard.
Customers want to feel acknowledged, especially when things are uncertain. A helpful, timely response that truly addresses your customer’s questions and concerns will go a long way in building trust.
Katie Harlow
Director of Support
Small, meaningful touches — like faster response times, a friendlier tone, or more thoughtful follow-ups — can go a long way in building trust and loyalty.
How to make it happen
Tools that help you deliver consistent, empathetic support can be a game changer when it comes to relationship building. Consider using your support software’s customer management feature to give your team the context they need to provide more personalized support or bringing more of your employees into the support process through programs like whole company support.
Having information like account details, order history, and past support conversations handy can reduce the amount of back and forth it takes to resolve issues. Pairing that context with responses from actual members of your engineering or leadership team helps ensure customers never feel like a number.
Scale delight with self-service
Customers want fast, accurate answers at the moment they need them. Self-service options, like well-organized help centers or AI-powered tools, aren’t just about efficiency — they’re about delivering a good customer experience at scale.
If you happen to be someone who has been stuck in a “doom loop” in the past, unable to get ahold of a real person, you may feel some apprehension at the mention of AI — especially when we just talked about the importance of building stronger customer relationships.
However, self-service and AI aren’t (or at least shouldn’t be) about keeping your customers away from your support team. Instead, these features are all about giving customers what they need. When someone has an easy question — like “How do I reset my password?” — the best experience is always going to be an instant answer that can get the person back on their way as quickly as possible.
By handling basic questions instantly through self-service, your team gains more time to provide personalized attention to complex issues that require expertise and empathy, ensuring a good experience for all customers, regardless of their needs.
How to delight, not deflect
Create a customer knowledge base that includes helpful information like answers to FAQs, product walkthroughs, and video explainers. Making your documentation readily available will get customers the answers they need quickly and also free up your team for issues that can’t be resolved through self-service.
Not sure where to start? Check out our knowledge management guide for helpful tips.
You may also want to look into using AI tools like a smart assistant on your website or within your product to help provide information in the moment. Just be sure that you use tools that prioritize customer experience and that you always provide a pathway to speaking to a human for moments where self-service can’t properly meet customer needs.
Build trust with transparency
Trust is one of your most valuable currencies. Your customers may not expect you to have all the answers, but they do value clear, timely, and honest communication. Whether you're raising prices, introducing new features, or evolving your product, being upfront about what’s changing and why helps build stronger, more resilient customer relationships.
At Help Scout, we’ve had our fair share of honest conversations with customers. Our most recent example is the move from user based pricing to a model that is contact based. This was a huge decision and one we didn’t take lightly. Although we were (and are!) convinced that this was the best move for our business, we also knew that the transition wouldn’t be easy.
We did a lot of research and preparation ahead of our official launch. We conducted customer interviews and created relevant Docs articles, our support department set up a special mini-team to become pricing experts, and we created content like emails as well as LinkedIn and blog posts to help explain our reasoning to our customers.
Once we flipped the switch, we did receive a lot of positive feedback, but not every conversation started out that way.
In the conversation above, a customer wrote in with concern about cost. Given that their account only had one user — they had three people who rotated support duty, all sharing a single login — switching over to contacts served seemed like it was going to cause a large increase to their monthly bill.
We’ve been upfront with our customers — some customers will pay less on the new plans, while others will pay more. However, in this case, there was a misunderstanding in how the change would be implemented for customers with larger increases. We were able to explain our pricing cap plan to the customer, which thankfully made them more comfortable sticking with Help Scout.
We’re glad that the customer wrote in. It gave us an opportunity to have a personal conversation so that we could clear up any confusion and find a way forward. We were also able to show the customer how one of the plan’s new features — unlimited users — might benefit them.
How to embrace transparency
There are many ways to provide transparency to your customers. We’re in the thick of our pricing model change, and we’re doing our best to encourage discussion, be upfront with our reasoning, set proper expectations, and show the value our new plans provide.
As another example, if you are introducing AI to your support experience, you can provide transparency by explaining how the tech works, defining how customer data is being used, and being clear about the tool’s limitations.
No matter what type of changes your business needs to make, keeping the lines of communication open and remembering to be honest about the what and the why is always going to be the right move.
Don’t go it alone
In times of change, connection matters. Whether you're looking for new ideas, gut-checking a big decision, or simply needing encouragement, support communities, peer networks, and trusted partners can offer perspectives you won’t find on your own.
Recently, we hosted three leadership dinners where we gathered CX leaders in various regional markets. Many attendees expressed gratitude for the opportunity to discuss how they’re navigating challenging scenarios in a face-to-face format.
Dillon McDermott
Director of Sales
Creating space to have those conversations — especially outside of Slack threads and Zoom calls — can help you think more clearly and feel less alone in the decision-making process. It’s a reminder that while every company is unique, many share the same challenges.
How to stay connected
Finding a professional community can be challenging, but there are many great ones out there, both online and in-person, that can act as sounding boards when you’re in need of support or a different point of view. Here are a few online communities that members of our team belong to that might be worth looking into:
Final thoughts
We believe that keeping the customer at the heart of every decision you make leads to resilience. In times of uncertainty, it’s what helps us stay grounded, connected, and ready for whatever comes next.
We hope these tips are useful, and if there are other ways we can support you as you navigate uncertain waters, we’re here to help.
Katharine Lucic
When Katharine isn’t working to delight customers at Help Scout you can find her traveling the world with her family, running on hilly trails, or on the couch with some good fiction.
