How Small Support Teams Deliver Big Results with Intercom + AI | Ep. 8 with Tobi Davis
What if your small support team could operate like a full-scale Customer Success department — without adding headcount?
That’s exactly what Pupil Progress achieved. In this episode, Tobi Davis shares how their team connected Intercom, HubSpot, and Fin AI Agent to create a tightly aligned, proactive support model.
By introducing “Collaborators” — support agents linked directly to Customer Success Managers — Pupil Progress made it easy for both teams to stay on the same page. Intercom automations now surface at-risk schools, CX Score replaces low-response CSAT surveys, and AI handles repetitive queries so humans can focus on strategic conversations.
The result? A small, resourceful team that drives renewal confidence, customer adoption, and true cross-functional impact — all powered by smart workflows.
🎧 Watch the full episode to see how you can apply the same approach in your own support setup.
Episode Transcript
Conor Pendergrast (00:01)
I'm Conor Pendergrast from CustomerSuccess.cx and welcome to episode eight of support stack.
So Tobi Davis, head of customer experience at Pupil Progress, you're back for a third episode. Thank you very much for joining me today. I'm excited to learn more about this one because I think this is...
Tobi Davis (00:19)
Yes.
pleasure.
Conor Pendergrast (00:27)
This is probably more relevant to smaller organizations, but I think we have a lot more smaller companies in the world than big companies in the world and small companies where people are trying their best with limited resources. like last episode, if people saw it, that was episode six, no, episode seven actually it was, we were talking about how you...
Tobi Davis (00:36)
Yes. ⁓
Conor Pendergrast (00:53)
and the support team helps to increase the likelihood that things will go smoothly when there are higher risk situations with schools, not high risk high risk, but in terms of churn and renewal and smoothing through difficult periods of time. But there are other ways in which you, your team and the success team, customer success team and customer success managers, how you collaborate and work together. Can you give us a bit of an idea about where this started?
Tobi Davis (01:05)
Yes. ⁓
Yeah, absolutely.
And the first thing I'll say, and I know we will come to this in the next episode, but using Fin and adopting Fin as a sort first point of call really has really changed support for us in a lot of ways. And I think made it more enjoyable for our team and more impactful for our users as well. And the reason why I say that is that we used
to get a lot more simple stuff coming through to us than we get now. For us, that would be things like, how do I change the grade boundaries? How do I add an assessment? Sort of these things that, it's like, okay, that comes through, hashtag, the macro name is, yeah, and then send, done, and we're all good.
Conor Pendergrast (01:55)
Mm.
Use the macro. Send. Done. Next.
Tobi Davis (02:17)
still get those every now and again, which is obviously a couple of episodes ago, we were speaking about our resource packs, but nowhere near as much as we used to because obviously, Fin's taking a lot of that time. And so as a result of that, what we are getting is actually a lot more consultative things coming through on support, right? And things that really require that sort of deeper level of understanding and our users on that next level of
adoption asking, know, why if I put this number in here is this number coming out here or why, you know, is your tracker set up this way? Our trackers are all specific to the exam board, but obviously there's always some things that are kind of open to discretion. And so, you know, the questions that we're getting coming through are, you know, I teach French, for example, and I teach it this way, but your track is set up this way and sort of
trying to find that middle ground, that balance. And so that's something that would come up every now and again, but for the most part...
Conor Pendergrast (03:18)
Hmm.
Tobi Davis (03:29)
were conversations that were handled by our customer success team on those kind of health checks or adoption calls or even visits to the schools to meet the subject leaders and run through those there. But we came to a bit of a realization just before the summer that our support team were actually already having a lot of these conversations. A lot of things that would traditionally go through customer success are coming through support
just because support is lowest barrier to entry for our customers, right? It's the easiest place for them to go and get a response. And those conversations are really positive. Our team are answering those questions really well. And...
you know, are certainly capable of doing that. So from there, it's kind of a case of, okay, you know, as you mentioned in the beginning, Conor we were a relatively small company, you know, we would love, I'm sure you could speak to every one of my colleagues in the leadership team and they would tell you five people that they would want to hire immediately. But...
Conor Pendergrast (04:41)
Yep.
Tobi Davis (04:43)
You know, we're not in the we're not in the position to do that. So how can we maximize the resources that we have with the really, really fab team that we have at the moment? And one thing there for us is almost a case of looking at, okay, you know, what kind of conversations are support having? What kind of conversations are customer success having? Well, customer success are having conversations about revenue, about renewal, you know, the kind of brass tacks of things and making
sure that the kind of contract is renewed, the lights stay on, et cetera, et cetera. And each of our customer success managers are super, super busy. They've got quite a large portfolio of schools. And at the end of the day, they need to be having those conversations. So at
Conor Pendergrast (05:36)
and focused on those conversations. Yeah.
Tobi Davis (05:38)
Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, what can we do? Well, in support, we're already taking a lot of the other conversations that they're having, right? The ones that are more adoption, engagement, you know, specific questions to sort of solve specific adoption issues. And so, you know, what we kind of set up is really born from the idea of support.
supporting our CSMs and sort of looking at things that they can take off of their plates so that the CSMs can focus on those conversations that only they can have.
Conor Pendergrast (06:19)
Hmm.
Yeah. And so we've said, you said the word collaborative quite a bit and that's, that's what you defined. If, it was a collaborator between, ⁓ a collaborator to work alongside your customer success
Tobi Davis (06:24)
Yes.
That's absolutely right, yeah. So you can see I've just popped up here a workflow that we have on Intercom with our members of the team. again, sort of if you watched the last episode, you'll know that a lot of what we do from the customer success and sales side is on HubSpot. And it's only really our support team who are working from Intercom.
Conor Pendergrast (06:41)
yeah.
Yeah.
Tobi Davis (07:02)
So you will see what we have on here is the collaborator is a member of our support team who is essentially kind of supporting the CSM with that account, with that particular deal. So if something's coming through that is someone needs a training call or someone needs some kind of adoption support, the CSM super busy, it would be a quicker, smoother customer
customer experience to get from support, that's the person that the account manager, the customer success manager can go to to kind of lean on and get support from there. So.
Conor Pendergrast (07:43)
Right. in HubSpot,
which you use as pupil progress uses as your CRM, you've defined that each school has a collaborator and the collaborator is someone from the support team. So is it everyone or is it just, is it targeted to specific kind of schools?
Tobi Davis (07:50)
That's right.
That's right.
⁓ It's it's it's everyone. However, there are some kind of
differences in how we divvy them up, depending on other responsibilities. So, say for example, we have a colleague in the team who is sort of team lead and has a lot of organizational admin responsibilities. She will have fewer schools that she's the collaborator on and other sort of specialisms and time that needs to be protected for other things will mean that the number of schools
the amount of this type of workload will vary.
Conor Pendergrast (08:43)
less time available. Okay.
So the HubSpot, the, the collaborator on HubSpot gets pushed over to intercom and that gets set as the company level for in intercom. And then this workflow comes through and it pushes that on every, it says, so that's a conversation attribute that gets pushed onto the conversation.
Tobi Davis (08:57)
Yeah.
That's absolutely right. So yeah, gets pushed as a conversation attribute. you know, saying this, what we are sort of not doing, I suppose, is, you know, having all of the support conversations go through the collaborator. In terms of our support, you know, processes, the way that we manage our queue, that kind of hasn't changed. That's still the same. It's, you know, you'll be scheduled for Intercom queue, for example, and you take the conversations as they
they come in or as whatever the appropriate level of priority is as we spoke about in the last episode. But what it does mean is that when you're in the inbox and our customer success managers and our collaborators will be in regular contact about some of these accounts, some of these schools, it means that you're really able to see the outstanding conversations that are open with
Contacts from from that school that you're working with so anything that is potentially
you know, that we're a bit behind on or that we're waiting on something for or whatever it might be. So that either the customer success manager knows if they have a meeting with that school about something, they can preempt questions they might get from the leadership within the school. Or, you know, you could even sort of drill down one step further there and start looking at things like CSAT, CX score and sort of try to
Conor Pendergrast (10:39)
Mmm.
Tobi Davis (10:42)
paint that bigger picture for your schools that you're the collaborator on and then you know if you've got some some time to to support the customer success manager and you haven't necessarily got a specific list of actions that need doing you know you can maybe start to identify some of those schools that that could benefit from that bit of extra adoption support.
Conor Pendergrast (11:06)
That's great.
So maybe to reiterate that point, it doesn't mean that every conversation that you're a collaborator on gets assigned to you, but it does mean that you have a way of looking and saying, okay, well, I see that there are, you know, for those watching the video, you've got the collaborators. One of your many views in intercom and your inbox is the collaborators one. And so if Holly, for example, is
Tobi Davis (11:24)
Yes.
Conor Pendergrast (11:30)
on is working the inbox and sees, well, it's quiet in my own inbox, but I see that there are five of my schools, the ones that I collaborate on are open there. I'm going to take a look and see if there's anything that I can, like, maybe I'll just take it over. It's a continuation of a conversation that I saw and it's going fine, but I have a small bit of extra context. And then similarly, if there's another person who's working with a school and it's a conversation that maybe they think Holly should.
engage in or should see, they can, they'll see that on the left, on the right hand side through the, through the conversation data. And will know that Holly's the right person to go to. I thought, I thought the, was really interesting what you mentioned a second ago though, about, about that, that sort of proactive piece or that the, the like reporting piece where it does give the ability to go and look at reports specifically about the companies that you'll work with. And the CX score one is really interesting because
Tobi Davis (12:21)
Mm-hmm.
Conor Pendergrast (12:30)
CSAT is useful, surveyed CSAT is useful, but it has such low response rate that using the CX score, which Intercom calculates for every conversation it can, means that you get basically like every conversation gets that score and you can go and say, well, of the companies I collaborate on, which conversations are getting low CX scores? And then dig into that and try and spot if there's like a pattern that...
Tobi Davis (12:35)
Yeah.
Conor Pendergrast (12:58)
that shows a poor setup, for example.
Tobi Davis (13:00)
Yeah, this is, it's absolutely right what you say. I think all of these things, you know, and really the way that we try to set up our intercom workspace and structure our agents day is born from, you know, a belief, my belief that.
the role of being a support agent is so different to what it was even like two years ago, three years ago, right? Whereby you'd log on, you'd sort of get through your conversations, you get to the end of the day and you do the same thing. Where AI is super useful as we speak about is taking those quicker, easier things. But it means that support, in my opinion, is more of a value driver than it always has been, but more than it...
it ever has been because what we're doing is we're actually creating the scope for that to be part of our support agent role, right? Where it's like, okay, you're solving customers' problems, but then you're going above and beyond and identifying where problems maybe weren't solved or where things were going wrong and acting on that there and then. That's not just the responsibility of...
the support manager anymore and instead everybody's able to have that agency about their own day, about their own schools that they work with. And I think is really a lot ⁓ more fitting for the kind of the age that we're in and the things that AI is really good at. Because AI is really, really good at answering questions like this. Our team are really, really good at going deeper
understanding
deeper on what schools need, what the adoption problems are, how to solve them. so support has really kind of, you know, accelerated, I suppose, into a truly proactive model, a truly kind of above and beyond model to, you know, aid adoption and ultimately impacts renewal revenue as much as possible.
Conor Pendergrast (15:14)
That's fantastic.
I think this is a really innovative way of taking the skills and the insights and the experience and the knowledge that your team has.
from working with so many schools and so many people in those schools and working just in your product as well, obviously. But having all of that knowledge and having it applied in a really, really ⁓ proactive and productive and helpful way for all of your schools and customers, I think it's brilliant. Tobi, thank you very much for ⁓ walking us through this. This has been really
If anyone's watching this and they're like, I want to see more of that Tobi Davis guy. ⁓
Tobi Davis (15:57)
Ha ha.
Conor Pendergrast (15:58)
How could they find out more about you or about pupil progress?
Tobi Davis (16:02)
Yeah, well, you're more than welcome to send me a message on LinkedIn, send me a connection request on LinkedIn. Quite proud of what we've set up here, so more than happy to answer any questions. But yeah, if you want to find out more about Pupil Progress, just type it into Google and ⁓ if our SEO is doing its job, then it all should come up. ⁓
Conor Pendergrast (16:23)
Ha ha ha.
Thank you very much Tobi, that's great. if you would like to see future episodes of Support Stack, just subscribe to the YouTube channel. Go to youtube.com slash at support dash stack. If that's too much of a mouthful for you, go to customersuccess.cx/daily where you'll find my weekdaily email list and you will get every, every single thing that you might desire about support stack emailed right into your lovely little inbox, as well as any other things that are coming to mind. And I think you'll find useful.
about intercom or customer support leadership. Other than that, have a delightful rest of your day. Toodle-oo. Bye.
Tobi Davis (17:03)
Bye bye.