Sender.net is an email and SMS marketing platform used by over 180,000 businesses worldwide. From solo creators sending their first newsletter to ecommerce teams running complex automation flows, Sender's promise has always been the same: powerful marketing tools at a price small businesses can actually afford.
That promise put a unique kind of pressure on the support team. A generous free plan and an entry-level price point meant the customer base grew faster than headcount ever could. Every new user came in with the same critical questions: How do I authenticate my domain? Why did my email land in spam? How do I connect Shopify? The team needed a way to answer these instantly, in dozens of languages, without diluting the human touch their power users relied on.
Helply became the foundation that made it possible.
Key Performance Highlights
72% Resolution Rate
Helply now deflects or resolves nearly three out of four support conversations end-to-end, freeing humans for the issues that actually need them.
50% Drop in Support Volume
The number of conversations reaching a human agent has been cut in half since Helply went live across the marketing site, app, and knowledge base.
Flat Headcount, 3x Customers
The support team has stayed the same size while the customer base has nearly tripled.
The Challenge: Scaling a Free Plan Without Drowning Support
Sender's free-forever plan is a deliberate go-to-market choice. It means anyone, anywhere, can start sending professional emails without a credit card. It also means the support inbox sees an enormous volume of first-time questions every single day.
"With email marketing, the first 24 hours are everything," explains Joe Wagner, Head of Customer Support at Sender.net. "If a new user can't authenticate their domain or figure out why their first campaign didn't send, they leave. We don't get a second chance. So response time isn't a nice-to-have for us, it's the product."
The team had built an extensive help center, but documentation alone wasn't closing the loop. Users didn't want to read articles, they wanted answers. And as Sender expanded into new regions, the inbox started filling up with questions in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Lithuanian, and a dozen other languages the small team couldn't cover natively.
The Turning Point: A Support Layer That Actually Reads the Docs
Sender evaluated several AI support tools but kept hitting the same wall: most could surface a help article, but very few could actually answer the question.
"We didn't want a chatbot that says 'here are five articles that might help,'" Wagner says. "Our users are already on the help page. They want the answer. Helply was the first tool we tried that read our entire knowledge base, understood the product, and gave a real answer the first time."
Setup took less than a week. The team pointed Helply at the Sender knowledge base, the public marketing site, and the in-app docs. Within days, Helply was resolving questions about SPF records, automation triggers, segmentation logic, and Shopify integration setup, all without a human in the loop.
Why Helply Was Different
For Wagner, three things separated Helply from every other AI support tool the team had tested:
- Native multilingual support: "A user writes in Lithuanian, Helply replies in Lithuanian. A user writes in Portuguese, same thing. We didn't translate a single article. It just works, and the answers are accurate, not just translated."
- Real conversation visibility: "I can read every single conversation Helply has with a customer. That's a huge deal. With outsourced support, you trust the metrics. With Helply, I can verify the quality myself, every day, in five minutes."
- Deflection that doesn't feel like deflection: "Customers aren't getting bounced around. They're getting answers. That's the difference between a deflection metric that looks good on a dashboard and one that actually reflects a happy customer."
The Results
- Helply now resolves 72% of all incoming conversations without human intervention.
- Total support volume reaching agents dropped by roughly 50% within the first three months.
- The team scaled from supporting 60,000 customers to over 180,000 without adding a single agent.
- Multilingual coverage expanded from 3 languages handled by humans to 30+ handled by Helply.
- Average first-response time dropped from over an hour to under 10 seconds for the majority of conversations.
- The human support team now focuses almost entirely on deliverability investigations, billing, and enterprise customer success.
The Future
Sender plans to keep its free plan generous and its pricing transparent, which means the customer base will keep growing faster than any traditional support team could match. With Helply handling the front line, the team can invest in deeper deliverability expertise and proactive customer success without watching the inbox spiral out of control.
"If you're running support for a product with a big free tier or a global user base, you have to try Helply," Wagner concludes. "It's not a chatbot. It's a teammate that never sleeps, speaks every language our customers speak, and gets better every week. It's the reason we can keep saying yes to growth without burning out the team."
