How AIHR supports 25,000 members with a four-person support team

The Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) helps HR professionals build the skills they need to grow their careers. Through courses, certificate programs, live events, an AI copilot, and an active community, the company serves around 25,000 members. Behind that experience is a remarkably lean support operation. AIHR’s core support team consists of just four people.

For Neal Travis, Customer Experience Manager at AIHR, keeping the team small has meant being thoughtful about where people spend their time. Over the years, he’s built a support operation designed to handle the predictable work efficiently, while giving his team more room for the questions that actually need them.

More recently, AI Answers has become a big part of that equation.

Building a smarter support operation

When Neal joined AIHR, customer support lived in Gmail. At the time, that was enough. But as AIHR grew, Neal wanted more visibility into the questions coming in and how the team was handling them. So in 2021, he started looking for a dedicated support platform.

He considered Freshdesk, Zendesk, and HubSpot Service Hub before choosing Help Scout. What stood out wasn’t a long list of features. It was how quickly he could get the team up and running, start collecting useful data, and build from there. And build they did.

Today, AIHR has around 200 workflows running behind the scenes in Help Scout. They filter and route conversations, keep the queue organized, and give the team visibility into what needs attention. Custom fields capture structured information like customer segments and cancellation reasons, while tags help automate processes and make conversations easier to scan. Help Scout also connects with HubSpot, AIHR’s primary CRM, through native integrations and Zapier.

It’s a sophisticated setup for a small team. But that’s exactly the point. Neal has spent years building systems that help four people support a much larger member base. Eventually, that brought him to AI.

The weekend that changed the equation

AIHR was already thinking seriously about AI across the company when Neal started experimenting with AI Answers. The opportunity in support was pretty clear. His team was spending a lot of time on tier-one questions where the answer already existed somewhere in AIHR’s knowledge base. If AI Answers could reliably handle those questions, the support team could spend more of its day on the work that needed a person.

At first, Neal gave members a choice. They could start with AI Answers or go directly to the support team. About 50% chose AI. Then came Easter weekend. With the team away from the office, Neal got a much clearer look at what AI Answers could do on its own. It resolved between 85% and 90% of the conversations it handled during the test period.

That gave Neal enough confidence to make a bigger change: AI Answers would become the first stop for everyone coming through Beacon.

Changing what reaches the inbox

For a lean support team, that shift matters. AIHR’s support team handles questions about the platform, certificate access, memberships, subscriptions, and more. Before AI Answers, even straightforward questions still had to make their way through the queue and be triaged by a person.

Now, many of those questions can be handled before they ever reach the team.

That’s especially useful because AIHR’s support team works from the Netherlands while its members may need help outside of those office hours. AI Answers can keep helping when the team is offline, so members don’t always have to wait for someone to come back online to get an answer.

And when the team does come back, there’s less noise waiting for them. That leaves them with more room for the conversations where their knowledge and judgment make a difference. For Neal, that’s one of the biggest benefits of AI Answers. It adds capacity without asking a small team to simply move faster.

Making AI the first stop for support

What started as an experiment over a holiday weekend has become part of how AIHR delivers support every day.

AI Answers now sits at the front of the support experience in Beacon, handling questions it can answer from AIHR’s knowledge before they reach the team. It’s also there when the team isn’t, giving members another way to get help outside of AIHR’s office hours.

For Neal, the Easter weekend test answered the question he started with: could AI reliably take on a meaningful part of the support experience? An 85% to 90% resolution rate gave him his answer. So he stopped treating AI Answers like an option and made it part of the way AIHR supports every member who comes through Beacon.