By the end of 2024, we were already all-in on Fin, and our customer support organization was deep in its own transformation. Resolution rates were strong, efficiency was improving, and for the first time, something new was emerging: capacity.
That newfound capacity wasn’t just a relief; it was a strategic opening. As we became less reactive day to day, I saw how support’s unique vantage point—rooted in customer needs and aligned with company goals—could evolve into a consultative function that actively drives value for customers and the business.
This is the story of how we built consultative support. I’ll walk you through how we got started, the results we achieved, and the lessons I’d carry forward if I were doing it again from scratch.
We didn’t begin from zero. A few years earlier, we partnered closely with research and data science to drive product adoption. In a project we called “next best step,” we tested offering proactive guidance inside already-established conversations. It worked well, and as Fin accelerated how we worked, we realized we were ready to push into broader, more ambitious opportunities.
Instead of dictating a solution from the top, I opened the floor. We hosted a support town hall and asked the team to share concrete ways support could directly drive company outcomes. The conversation was electric—practical, creative, and grounded in real customer moments.
Right there, we spun up campaign concepts. One idea was an always-on in-product banner offering a call with a member of our team to help customers set Fin up to the best of its ability. Another was the “Fin upsell campaign,” where, once a customer had a positive interaction with Fin and clicked the “that helped” button, a tailored message would share details about our own success with Fin and invite the customer to book a call to learn more and ask questions.
The energy from that session made one thing obvious: the team already knew how to help customers extract more value from the product. They just needed focus, permission, and a clear path to act.
We started small on purpose. I recruited a group of volunteers who dedicated part of their week to exploring new, proactive ways to support customers. We kept the group tight for two reasons: first, even with Fin freeing up significant capacity, we still had to deliver excellent day-to-day support; second, this was an experiment, and we weren’t going to overhaul a 100+ person organization without proof.
One of our first campaigns focused on proactive engagement with self-serve customers—those without a dedicated sales or success touchpoint. Our goal was to give this group direct access to teammates with first-hand experience in AI transformation and help them see the value they could get from Fin.
Early use cases included guiding customers through Fin trials, working with mature customers on optimization to get more out of Fin, and proactively identifying high-potential accounts that looked ready for Fin. None of this required a new team or a big budget—just attention and intention.
To make consultative support stick, we trained for a mindset shift. I encouraged the team to move beyond solving the immediate issue and instead probe deeper to understand each customer’s unique context. We leaned on our sales and success peers to refine our outreach—learning how to time our messages, frame value succinctly, and meet customers at the right moment rather than waiting for them to come to us.
To validate our approach, we needed data—not vibes. We built a simple but rigorous comparison: accounts we engaged with versus accounts we reached out to but didn’t hear back from. Over a six month period, we tracked feature adoption, Fin usage, and expansion revenue across both groups.
The result was clear: engaged accounts grew roughly twice as fast in both usage and expansion.
To further prove the value of proactive support, we also tracked direct Fin resolutions generated after consultative interactions, resolution and automation rate improvements across engaged accounts, and influenced expansion ARR across everything we worked on over the year.
Seeing those numbers was a turning point. This wasn’t a side project anymore—it was a repeatable motion with measurable business impact.
As results became visible, partnerships multiplied. Self-serve engineering teams saw the value of well-timed human touchpoints. Customer lifecycle marketing tapped us to handle responses to their campaigns. Product teams began partnering with us to identify high-impact engagement opportunities. We also deepened our collaboration with digital, scale, and high-touch success teams—stepping in where they lacked capacity and offering deep technical guidance to help customers get the best from the platform.
What began as simple outreach matured into targeted, strategic initiatives tied directly to company goals.
Within a year, our volunteer crew grew to ~16 teammates across regions—curious, motivated, and eager to try new things. We continued expanding the consultative support function and took on new projects end to end. Most recently, we assumed ownership of the new “sales assist” team to drive self-serve trial conversions and help new customers get the most from their first experience.
Here are the practices that mattered most in making consultative support real and durable:
Start with your team, not a strategy doc. The best ideas came from the people closest to customers. That town hall shaped our initial direction more than any top-down plan could have.
Don’t scale before you’ve proved it. A small, motivated group moved faster, learned quicker, and produced clearer results than a broad rollout. When you need organizational buy-in, a rigorous proof point beats a promising concept.
Train for a different mindset. Consultative work requires curiosity, commercial awareness, and the ability to hold broader context—not just product knowledge. Invest deliberately in coaching and frameworks that strengthen these muscles.
Measure against a control group. Without a control, you have a story. With it, you have a business case—and that’s what unlocks resources, headcount, and prioritization.
Lean into being different. It’s helpful to take cues from sales and success, but you don’t have to operate exactly like them. There’s real power in support’s distinct perspective and tone.
Building this consultative support function fundamentally changed how we think about our remit. Support is no longer just there to respond; it now drives adoption, influences retention, generates expansion revenue, and, for many self-serve customers, serves as the primary human touchpoint.
In an AI-first world, where Fin handles all of the transactional work, this kind of work becomes even more important. Because the question for support leaders is no longer “how do we handle more tickets?” but rather, “how do we use support to grow the business?”
Inspired by this post on The Intercom Blog.
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