How SchoolsPLP keeps thousands of relationships connected with Help Scout

SchoolsPLP provides an online learning platform to thousands of schools and districts, helping teachers and administrators manage online courses for their students. But supporting a school district is different from supporting an individual software user. A single customer relationship can span multiple schools, administrators, teachers, and years of interactions. When someone reaches out for help, understanding the person asking the question is often only the beginning. The SchoolsPLP team also needs to understand the institution behind them. That’s especially important during the busiest parts of the school year. From mid-July through September, and again in January, support volume climbs as schools prepare for new terms, set up courses and catalogs, manage renewals, and bring new users onto the platform. With Help Scout, SchoolsPLP has built a support operation that keeps those relationships connected — giving its team the history and context to understand what’s happened before, AI to handle questions that don’t require a person, and a shared place to work through the complex problems that do.

Moving beyond Outlook

When SchoolsPLP started using Help Scout in 2019, its support operation was running primarily through a shared Outlook inbox. Traditional email made it difficult to know who saw a request, who was responding, or what someone else on the team was already working on. For Chief Operating Officer Josh Leitz, that visibility remains one of the most important things Help Scout provides.

“You don’t have to Teams message somebody to tell them that you’re working on something,” Josh says. “You literally have it open and people can see it. It saves them time and communication.”

Today, a small group of power users handles support across SchoolsPLP, with other team members brought into conversations when their expertise is needed. Instead of coordinating that work outside the inbox, the team can leave internal notes directly alongside the customer conversation.

“Anyone who opens the conversation can see our notes, what we’ve already tried, and what we think might be going on,” says Senior Training and Support Lead Kim Schnepper. “Having all of that context in one place makes it much easier to collaborate.”

Keeping the history behind every relationship

When an unfamiliar issue comes in, the SchoolsPLP team often starts by looking backward. Previous conversations can provide clues about what happened before, but Help Scout gives SchoolsPLP a broader view of the schools and districts behind those conversations, too. Company Management brings conversations from people across the same organization together, making it easier to see patterns that might otherwise be scattered across individual requests and missed. 

“We can see, at a glance, how many tickets they’re putting in,” Kim says. “Maybe they’re going to need another training at some point because they have a lot of questions.” Taken together, those insights help SchoolsPLP move beyond resolving the issue in front of them to recognizing what a customer may need next, turning the conversations happening in support into a signal about the relationship as a whole.

Giving routine questions a faster path to an answer

But not every question requires that level of investigation. SchoolsPLP uses AI Answers to help teachers and administrators find answers on their own. “It’s searching our database of articles to help direct the customers before reaching out to us,” Kim says, “which obviously cuts down on the amount of tickets that we get.”

 And when AI Answers can’t resolve something, the question becomes a ticket so the team can step in. SchoolsPLP’s platform is sophisticated, and troubleshooting can mean digging into a customer’s configuration, understanding the settings they’ve changed, and piecing together why something is behaving unexpectedly. “If they come in with some weird thing that’s happening, I like to be able to dive in and see what’s causing that issue,” Kim says. For SchoolsPLP, AI Answers isn’t a replacement for that kind of support. It gives straightforward questions a faster path to an answer while preserving the team’s time for the issues where their knowledge of the platform — and the customer — matters most.