Help Scout offers its partners and customers a customer experience-focused platform. In an extended interview with the company’s partnership leaders and one of its partners, we dug into how the vendor is driving value in key verticals and opportunities.
Triad Technology Partners was founded in 2009 and supports public sector clients with a variety of technology solutions and services. Jessica Lidh, Triad’s services and contracts administrator, says the team was looking to onboard new vendor partners when they found Help Scout.
“As soon as we met and engaged with Help Scout, we knew we had a winning partner on our hands and wanted to introduce them to our wider team,” said Lidh. “We love how easy they are to work with and how partner-friendly they are, but we also love the look and feel of the entire platform.”
“Initially we found Help Scout through market research. When we were revisiting our portfolio and looking for new partners to add to it, we focused on a couple of functional areas in IT,” said Kristin Rydland, director of services at Triad Technology Partners. She says after seeing Help Scout refenced by Gartner and others, the team reached out to learn more.
The partnership, Rydland says, extends beyond just buying a new platform to leverage with clients.
“We understood what their IT offerings were, but then we got to know them as a company– what was their strategy to bring their technology to the public sector and elsewhere, can we add any value to them,” said Rydland. “If we don’t have that shared strategy and shared goals, usually it’s a no to the partnership. We talked strategy a lot in the beginning, and I think we landed on a collective strategy just through those conversations.”
For Help Scout, the partnership is one example of how dedicated the company is to growing through the channel.
“We are so focused on partnerships and really growing this ecosystem by aligning ourselves with organizaitons that have the IT chops but are also thinking about getting really focused with their clients around business outcomes,” said Nicole Roskill, Help Scout’s director of partnerships.
“I think what we have found with Triad from the beginning is that they really understand where their clients will be investing and in the types of tools platforms they envision their clients needing,” Roskill added, noting that she has learned valuable insights into the needs of the public sector through conversations with the team.
Integrations, ongoing services, and other ways partners like Triad fuel client success
That deep expertise adds context, nuance, and opportunity to Help Scout-focused deals.
“We are really good at our platform and understanding client problems, so developing value props and resources is a strong piece that we bring, but Triad brings so much of the industry expertise, and they’re not only focused on communications platforms, they’ve got the more holistic view across the IT stack,” Roskill said.
“Public sector is really rooted in government providing services for their constituents. At the end of the day, it’s really rooted in their ability to provide a very high level of customer service and trust in security,” Rydland said.
Rydland also notes that tools Triad brings to the table for clients need to be easy to use, show a return on investment, and be used effectively internally and externally depending on the use case. Integration is also a critical component to successful adoption, and it’s a service Triad has deep expertise in providing.
“When we think about IT it’s a collection of applications and tools … and everything has to be able to work together,” Rydland said. “We’re very well versed in the IT service management space, but one thing we see in ITSM is that platforms are just massive. One thing we like to bring to the table is how does this integrate with the tools you already have.”
Rydland notes that Triad’s integration expertise pairs well with how Help Scout is building its platform to work well within users’ wider stack, and one of the opportunities for Triad moving forward lies in its ability to provide those integrations services to Help Scout users.
“We don’t have a professional services function at Help Scout, nor do we intend to build one. We’re training partners like Triad on some of the most common professional service needs that customers have,” Roskill said. “They have really leaned in with resources to get trained, so they’re capable not only to sell the platform, but they can also maek sure it is clothed with all of the services the customer needs to really get the value.”
Why Triad Technology Partners sees long-term success in the future with Help Scout
Even with the early wins, Rydland sees more on the horizon for Triad Technology Partners and Help Scout. She says she knows the platform can help more of the provider’s customers in the public sectors solve business problems, and she wants to see the offering expand over time.
“We have to think about who the customer is, for a lot of these groups it’s different for everybody. But at the end of the day, whether they’re using Help Scout internally or externally, Help Scout is so focused on adaptability and ease of use that these are really key components that all of our end users are looking for,” said Rydland.
Lidh emphasizes the importance of understanding that in the public sector, “customer” can hold several meanings, whether Triad is working with a government entity to deploy tooling internally or if the ultimate end user is the constituency of the entity. To her, a platform like Help Scout’s is crucial because Triad sees flexibility in how they can leverage the tooling uniquely amongst its clients.
“All the counties we work for, they all have some idea of what the other is doing, and that’s true on the state level as well,” Lidh said. “I’d love to have our customers and new customers approach us and say, ‘hey, I heard what you’re doing with Help Scout over there. How can we get that here and replicate those results?’”
“I hope to see Help Scout in government, I hope to see it get adopted maybe at a larger scale than what they were previously seeing,” Ryland said. “Whereas they were really more focused on small and medium-sized organizations, I would love to get them in front of these medium-sized organizations and really be adopted in a larger deal size.”
Ryland also says she thinks the product is well-positioned to succeed in the AWS marketplace and thrive within the public sector.
How Help Scout’s VP of partnerships views collaborating with channel ecosystem
Roskill has been with Help Scout for nearly two years and leads the partnerships strategy, which she says is a priority for the board and executive leadership.
“We view partnerships as really fundamental to our growth, and it is going to fuel our growth over the next few years,” Roskill said.
“There are some areas where deep area expertise is so important and why would we go and build that when there are providers out there that just understand these spaces so well,” Roskill added.
Roskill also notes that, like many companies operating in the channel, Help Scout likely couldn’t handle the scale of the procurement, contracting, and other things necessary to make purchase and deployment effective for end users. There, too, partners are a growth lever in building opportunities for long-term customer success.
“I frankly need partnerships not only to help us get into accounts that have the need where the Help Scout value proposition is so strong, but also to expand it. We don’t have resources on our team to go expand our footprint, and that’s where I think partner relationships are so strong.”
