2025 marks 14 years in enterprise for Assist Scout, and we just lately made probably the most radical choice in our historical past: Assist Scout not prices per seat.
In truth, each plan we provide immediately — together with the brand new free plan — consists of limitless seats (aka customers) and entry to all of our AI options.
Why make the change?
What companies want from their buyer help platforms has basically modified.
For a very long time, buyer help groups have operated like value facilities, and the software program adopted go well with. Corporations developed what we name a “deflection mindset.” It was all about fewer tickets, increased automation, and decrease prices. So long as CSAT is sweet, the crew is doing its job.
Nevertheless, the world’s most profitable firms not function that means. Corporations with increased NPS scores develop greater than 2x sooner and have 40% increased retention (supply). Phrase-of-mouth suggestions affect a staggering 74% of buy selections (supply). In different phrases, delight drives development. Your buyer help platform ought to be in service of development, not value chopping.
Advances in AI have solely widened the hole between what the market provides and what clients need. For the primary time in 20+ years, the desk stakes are altering.
This second prompted “day one” considering from our management crew: What would we do otherwise if we had been founding the corporate immediately? Answering that query compelled us to rework our enterprise.
Delight is now a crew sport
Charging per seat made sense within the deflection/cost-center period as a result of it rewarded companies for connecting fewer staff to the voice of the shopper. However delight is now a crew sport. Everybody has a job to play in buyer happiness. By democratizing entry to buyer suggestions, companies could make higher selections and in the end ship higher buyer experiences.
We’ve skilled this firsthand at Assist Scout. Since we don’t pay for our personal product, each worker within the firm has all the time had a login. Enabling people throughout gross sales, product, and operations to collaborate and join with clients is priceless, but we had been taxing any of our clients who needed to expertise the identical advantages.
So we went again to first ideas. How can we empower our clients to embrace the delight mindset? We got here up with three ideas:
In November, we launched a brand new pricing mannequin that replaces seats with what we name “contacts helped.” At a excessive stage, it is the variety of folks your crew helps in a month. It’s not based mostly on “tickets” or message counts. A number of conversations with the identical particular person nonetheless depend as one contact.
What’s a contact?
A contact is somebody you’ve got helped throughout one month-to-month billing interval, which incorporates:
E-mail conversations with no less than one reply
Telephone conversations created in Assist Scout
Channel conversations (resembling Messenger or Instagram) with no less than one reply
Chats accepted and replied to by a person in your account
Questions resolved by AI Solutions
You’ll be able to work together with the identical particular person throughout a number of channels, however they solely depend as one contact. The contact depend resets to zero every month-to-month billing cycle.
Since usage-based billing could be difficult for a help crew with seasonal intervals, we additionally decide the contact tier based mostly in your three-month trailing common as a substitute of solely the final month. Because of this, our new pricing is 34% much less variable than our outdated, per-seat pricing.
Lastly, the brand new metric enabled us to launch an industry-best free plan with limitless seats and a ton of options included. It’s restricted to 50 contacts, which is right for smaller groups. We’re very excited to have an important free plan once more.
Buyer migration
There are good the reason why firms do not change their enterprise fashions after 14 years. It is the toughest factor we have ever executed, and probably the most sophisticated half shall be serving to current clients navigate the change. In brief, will probably be a multi-year course of, and we’ll do all the things doable to ease any stress it would trigger.
We do not have a migration plan finalized but — a put up for one more day — however as we have all the time executed, current clients will obtain six months’ discover earlier than any adjustments are made to their plans. Prospects with outsized will increase also can count on will increase to be capped.
Change is uncomfortable, particularly while you’ve been doing issues a technique for therefore a few years. Nevertheless, we really feel it’s mandatory on this case and that it’ll allow us to raised serve clients in the long run. We’re excited to see what the long run holds.
