Turn Customer Data into White-Glove Support with Intercom + HubSpot | Ep. 7 with Tobi Davis
As teams scale, one of the hardest challenges is keeping everyone aligned on which customers need extra care. Sales and Success may flag a high-risk renewal, but if that signal doesn’t reach Support, the opportunity to deliver a proactive, “white-glove” experience gets lost.
In this episode, Tobi Davis, Head of Customer Experience at Pupil Progress, shares how his team connected HubSpot and Intercom to automatically surface those at-risk customers for their support team. By syncing deal-level data into Intercom, they made it effortless for agents to see which conversations should rise to the top — without extra meetings, manual tagging, or back-and-forth messages.
Tobi walks through:
The single HubSpot property that transformed how they prioritise customer conversations
How Intercom’s views and filters help agents focus on the right customers instantly
How this approach brought back the “everyone knows everything” clarity of a small team
Why small, well-placed data points can have an outsized impact on customer confidence and renewal rates
It’s a great example of how automation can increase empathy — freeing teams to focus on relationships, not admin.
Episode Transcript
Conor Pendergrast (00:00)
Hey, I'm Conor Pendergrast from customersuccess.cx and welcome to episode seven of support stack.
So Tobi Davis from Pupil Progress, welcome back. I'm excited to talk to you today because we're talking about using a little data point, using some information about a customer who is maybe not in the best situation or maybe just people want to keep an eye on and making sure that they get a great support experience. So what was the genesis of all this? What did you start with?
Tobi Davis (00:18)
either.
Yes.
That's right. Yeah, and it's sort of
It's it's really interesting right and i've been with pupil progress since it was really small business right sort of four or five of us all back to back in the same room and The good thing about that is that everybody knows everything all the time so if there's a particular deal that the ceo is, know really Keen on on coming through or there's a school that you know is is a bit of a risk for the renewal and
You know one of our CSMs will will really want to make sure they're getting all of the attention that they need It was nice and easy because you could kind of just tap someone on the shoulder or turn around and and find out immediately right and since we've grown to you know, be a More rounded business with different people doing different jobs in different teams you know It's a challenge right to keep to keep that kind of level of transparency or at least to ⁓
Keep a level of transparency. That means everybody's confident that The eyes are getting dotted and the T's are getting crossed sort of where they need to be so really what this was born from was a way to just give some extra confidence to our sales team and our customer success team that you know when there is ⁓ Real kind of special attention needed for for a particular customer for a particular deal and that they are able
to really easily relay that information across to the support team and we can kind of treat that accordingly.
Conor Pendergrast (02:15)
Hmm.
Yeah. And so what does that look like? Are the CSMs, the customer success managers or the sales team, are they coming? Are they sitting you down and saying, Tobi, Tobi, every time this customer comes in, I want you to treat them with white gloves. And it's every day you're sitting down and looking through the inbox and being like, click, click, click. It's a super manual process, is it?
Tobi Davis (02:41)
Yes, it's funny you say that I detected a hint of sarcasm in your question there, but funnily enough, that's kind of how it used to be in a way, right?
Conor Pendergrast (02:45)
Just a little bit.
Tobi Davis (02:53)
You know, I used to do all of the support conversations. If someone was saying, what's, you know, this, this, what's anybody from this school saying, I would know because I would have had all of those conversations. And then it's, it's a challenge because we got a little bit down the line. You know, we grew our support team from, from just me to six of us, ⁓ all together. And, and, you know, sometimes our customer success manager, our sales team will, will work in the same way. And they'll be like, what's going on with, ⁓ with this school.
And I'll be like, I have no idea. have absolutely no idea, right? Like, you know, I haven't spoken to anyone from there or maybe I haven't, it's good or maybe I haven't, it's bad, but you know, it's never gonna be the full picture. So, you know, really what we needed to do was have a way to categorize that on our system and make sure that that information is, of course, know, easy to find after the fact if we're looking to
Conor Pendergrast (03:24)
Hahaha.
Yeah.
Tobi Davis (03:53)
review or we're looking to prepare for say...
meeting with a lead contact or whatnot, but also in the moment. And some of this actually kind of harks back to what we spoke about in the last episode, which is giving the support team or our agents as much information as we possibly can for them to be able to do their job the right way, right? And so last time we spoke about, you know, they were able to sort of manually tag these users and
Conor Pendergrast (04:22)
Yeah.
Tobi Davis (04:29)
and send them sort of resources following a conversation.
What we set up to address this problem was kind of having that in the inbox at the time. So if our CSM is saying, this is a super crucial deal, we don't think they're gonna renew, there's a few contacts there who are really resisting, we need to make sure that everything for the next week, for the next two weeks up until this meeting that we're having is as polished as it can be. Exactly.
Conor Pendergrast (04:58)
goes buttery smooth. Yeah.
Tobi Davis (05:03)
really helpful for rather than having that conversation after the fact and the customer success manager saying how you know what's it been like with this school but instead you know as a support agent if I'm on the queue I can just see that as that comes in and I'm like okay this one is one that I need to to go sort of above and beyond for.
Conor Pendergrast (05:19)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Tobi Davis (05:26)
And yeah, so that's sort of the basis for our solution.
Conor Pendergrast (05:33)
Great.
So you mentioned we were talking about this beforehand. So you use the CRM, the sales team and the CSMs, your customer success managers, they use HubSpot as your CRM. And you've got that set up to push a piece of data from HubSpot into intercom. Is that correct?
Tobi Davis (05:41)
Yeah, that's right.
Yes, that
I'll just pop my screen up here. And we're looking at a workflow, super, super straightforward workflow. About as simple as it can get, exactly. So all it's doing is saying when a customer sends any message, it as priority. Obviously, if we go into the audience rules here, you'll see this from a support priority school is either prioritised or critical. So that is...
Conor Pendergrast (05:54)
Okay, so we're looking at a workflow here.
Yep, about as simple as you can get as a workflow.
Hmm.
Tobi Davis (06:20)
A property that exists on HubSpot just called support priorities, I think or something like that the you know, the the deal owner can either set that as prioritised or critical depending on the depending on the need And what that will do is that copy that value? from the deal to the to the to the contact and the company and then obviously that will also sync through to intercom so what we can do is Very clearly see which of our users
are coming from our priority schools because if it's marked in HubSpot it will come through on Intercom and if you know that deal renews or purchases or churns or for whatever reason they're not a priority anymore you know it's all in sync so that that property would be updated on HubSpot this marker on the Intercom contact would be removed and then you know they would they would just follow the sort of standard support procedure.
Conor Pendergrast (07:18)
Excellent.
so from a, from a support agent perspective, it doesn't, it doesn't require any of that mental overhead to think, ⁓ I recognize this school name. Tobi mentioned it on Monday in our, in our, in our meeting. So you don't have any of that remembering to do the support agent, your teammates are just getting a conversation. It's prioritized. So it's getting to the top of the queue relative to anything else. And then they're able to prioritize it that way. Is that correct?
Tobi Davis (07:22)
Yes.
Yes.
Thanks.
Yeah, so that's absolutely right. So it just comes through into our inbox here. You know, we really love a filters where a lot of views, we really get a lot of use out of them. But you can see we have this one come through here, which is priority schools, right? And so we can see, okay, you know, this is what we've got in there at the moment. Priority schools, okay, well, there's one in here. It looks like this is a conversation sort of been going on a while.
Conor Pendergrast (07:52)
You have a lot of views.
Super.
Tobi Davis (08:12)
but you know, this is... ⁓
Conor Pendergrast (08:13)
Hmm. And viewers won't be able
to see the the the email itself because we've blanked all that out.
Tobi Davis (08:20)
Yes, absolutely.
But this is one that, you know, I can see it's already with one of my colleagues here and... ⁓
If sort of what she'll be doing is, know, say she's on the queue after lunch or whatever it might be, and she's sort of looking through her conversations, first thing she's going to do is check that. Check any that have the star against them. Is there any immediate action that's needed? Am I waiting for somebody to do something? You know, is there sort of some element to this that needs that degree of sort of extra attention?
And it means that, you know, she's able to be a lot more confident with it in terms of if somebody is asking, if somebody's asking, you know, me or whoever it is, okay, you know, these teachers from these schools are, you know, have there been any problems recently? I've got a meeting with the head teacher, so I need to know beforehand if that's something, you know, we're able to answer those questions really clearly, get the information together really quickly. ⁓
and just run like a more well-oiled machine, I suppose, in the way that, exactly in the way that we sort of used to be able to when the team was much smaller.
Conor Pendergrast (09:33)
very smooth operation.
Hmm. And crucially
as well, without having to have each individual teammate add an extra step to when they're deciding and where they're deciding to put their focus. Like what, of the things we'll talk about in a later episode is how, how much work Fin is doing, which is great.
Tobi Davis (09:52)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Conor Pendergrast (10:01)
and it's taking a lot of the work away, you still, all your teammates, all your team is still handling the most complicated cases. That's how it works out. And will have to make decisions about how to prioritize their time. And by having this automation set up, you're making it lot easier for them to say like, okay, I know what.
Tobi Davis (10:10)
Mm-hmm.
Conor Pendergrast (10:20)
The priorities are, there are starred conversations, those are priority conversations, those rise naturally to the top of a ⁓ priority list without having to make that mental leap of, recognize the school name and therefore I should treat them really well.
Tobi Davis (10:34)
Yeah, absolutely that.
Conor Pendergrast (10:36)
Yeah, very cool. Tobi, this is really helpful and hopefully another way of intercom customers working out the most efficient ways of answering and bringing great customer support experiences. If anyone has any questions or wants to find out more about you and Pupil Progress, where should they go?
Tobi Davis (10:56)
Yes,
⁓ on LinkedIn do feel free to send me a message, send me a connection request on LinkedIn if there's any specific questions or anything that you think I can help with, but otherwise, yeah, take a look at Pupil Progress, check us out on LinkedIn, check us out on our website and you can learn everything you need to know there.
Conor Pendergrast (11:16)
Super,
and you can subscribe to this show, Support Stack, on YouTube, or you can sign up to my daily email list, customersuccess.cx/daily where I will give you a weekdaily email all about intercom and customer support leadership. And other than that, see you next week. Bye!