Help Scout’s AI Is at Your Service

The introduction of automated teller machines (ATMs) did not result in bank tellers losing their jobs. In fact, new teller roles were created at a faster rate than the overall labor market grew in the same period.

Artificial intelligence is a much broader set of technologies than ATMs require, and its full impact is unpredictable, but we do know it will create new opportunities for people to work in ways that were not previously possible or practical. 

Help Scout + AI

At Help Scout, we believe that AI won’t replace customer support teams, but it will instead enable them to amplify their efforts and have more meaningful customer conversations. We’ve been paying attention to the potential (and the potential risks) of AI for some time now, experimenting internally, and looking for the right opportunity to harness it in ways that benefit our customers and all the people they support.

We built features to make AI approachable, so teams can experience the benefits of AI without having to learn the ins and outs of large language models. They are designed for customer conversations and built right into the platform — no integrations, no plugins, and no copying and pasting required. 

These new features also:

• Reduce repetitive work and free up support folks to do more interesting and useful work.

• Increase the speed and effectiveness of each team member rather than replace them.

• Give reps more confidence in their responses and, ultimately, in the service they’re providing.

Today, we’re excited to tell you about the first of several AI-powered tools coming for Help Scout users: AI summarize [Beta].

Introducing: AI summarize ✨

In long, back-and-forth customer conversations, multiple team members often jump in to help and have to read through an entire conversation thread to know what needs to happen next. Effective support teams know how to write good internal notes to give each other context, but those can be time-consuming to create and are often reserved for only the trickiest situations.

AI summarize replaces all that effort with a single click of a button.

Conversation summaries in seconds

Your team needs an extra pair of hands to do the more repeatable, less creative work for them so they can use their expertise in more impactful ways. AI summarize makes it easy for your service team to create a bullet point summary of long email threads in a matter of seconds. No more wasting time combing through email threads — with one click they can get the context they need to deliver a better response. 

Anyone who can view the conversation can create a summary of up to five bullet points depending on the conversation length. When new threads are added to the conversation, users can easily refresh the summary. 

Summaries in action

Our team at Help Scout has been using AI summarize to support our customers and experiencing the smoother collaboration and increase in speed that it provides. Recently, product support analyst K’Shelle Waller was preparing a message about an upcoming account change, and she wanted to understand how customers had been feeling based on past conversations.

She notes:

AI summarize is now available on all current Plus and Pro plans, so hop into a conversation and give it a try! If you’re not on a Plus or Pro plan, we’ve got another AI feature coming soon to every Help Scout account. 

Note: Our AI features are currently in beta, meaning there may occasionally be some inaccuracy as we work to improve the quality over time. In order to provide your team with the most value in these features, we need your feedback. Please send your comments (positive and negative!) to help@helpscout.com. 

Interested in learning more about Help Scout’s methodology behind our AI features? Watch our webinar Help Scout + AI = Better Customer Support below to get a sneak peek at what our team is up to. 

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Interested in AI at Help Scout? Check out our recent webinar where we discussed our perspective on AI in customer service, and gave a quick look at our new AI-powered features.

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