-Apr-13-2026-05-55-20-9731-PM.png?width=199&height=45&name=image%20(1)-Apr-13-2026-05-55-20-9731-PM.png){kind=small}
The Background
When a Norwegian accountant is deep in a client's year-end reporting and hits a regulatory question they can't answer, they turn to Sticos. That's been true for more than forty years.
Founded in 1983 and headquartered in Trondheim, Sticos is a compliance software company within the Visma ecosystem, Europe's largest business software group, serving 2.4 million customers across 33 countries. Sticos occupies a specialized role within that ecosystem: it provides cloud-based reference tools, digital courses, and expert advisory services that help accounting and auditing professionals navigate Norway's demanding regulatory environment. Its flagship product, Sticos Oppslag, has served as the daily reference for tens of thousands of financial professionals working with tax codes, payroll rules, and labor laws.
The relationship between Sticos and its customers runs deeper than a typical software subscription. When an accountant has a question about Sticos, they often have a client waiting on the other end. Someone depending on a timely filing, a correct payroll calculation, or an accurate audit. The speed and accuracy of Sticos's support is, in a very real sense, part of the service their customers deliver to their own clients.
That responsibility had always driven the support team's urgency. But by 2024, the company's growth within Visma was beginning to outpace the support model that had earned all that trust, and the team behind it could feel it.
The Challenge
Clients Waiting on Clients
For the accounting and auditing professionals who rely on Sticos every day, a support request is almost never casual. It's a professional, mid-task, unable to reset a login, navigate a product feature, or resolve a compliance question, while their own client's deadline inches closer. Every hour that ticket sits unanswered is an hour their client doesn't get the answer they need.
Petter Aspås, Customer Success Manager and RevOps lead at Sticos, had watched this dynamic for years. He could see a pattern that was becoming harder to ignore: a growing share of incoming tickets were simple, repetitive questions (forgotten passwords, login issues, basic how-to questions) that consumed significant human time but added little value to the customer relationship. The answers existed. The problem was the speed and the channel.
A Channel Built on Decades of Habit
Between 30 and 40 percent of all inbound support arrive through email, a channel customers have defaulted to for 10, 15, even 20 years. Historically, email was the least efficient way for Sticos to receive questions. Without structured context, every ticket required the team to manually identify the customer, determine which product they were using, understand the question, and locate the right information before even beginning to respond.
"That's the least efficient way to receive customers' questions," Petter explained. "We can't determine if they have tried to get an answer any other way. We use a lot of time to find the customer, find correct information, really understanding the question."
Growth That Couldn't Wait
The pressure was about to intensify. Another Visma company was preparing to transfer an entire product line, along with roughly 25 new employees and approximately 15,000 additional support tickets, into Sticos's care. The team that came with the acquisition had been running on LiveLeader and Salesforce. Everything would need to consolidate onto one platform.
The math was simple and unforgiving. The existing support model could not absorb that kind of growth without significant hiring. And even if Sticos could hire fast enough, it would have more people handling easy, repetitive questions rather than doing the proactive customer work that actually helped accountants and auditors succeed with the platform.
The question facing Petter wasn't whether to evolve support. It was whether they could redesign it fast enough to keep their promise to the professionals, and the clients behind those professionals, who were counting on them.
The Solution
Starting with What the Customer's Client Needs
The accountants and auditors who use Sticos products don't need a personal conversation every time they forget a password. They need the right answer, immediately, so they can get back to the compliance work their own clients depend on. Petter and his team designed the new support system around that insight, beginning not with internal efficiency, but with the experience of the end customer.
Sticos deployed HubSpot's Customer Agent, starting with chat embedded directly within their products and knowledge base. Before activating anything, the team invested heavily in building a high-quality knowledge base: carefully structured articles covering the most common questions across every product. They supplemented this with read-only Q&A files for known issues, license agreements, and product and pricing pages from their website, giving the agent a broad, reliable foundation.
That foundation didn’t just improve accuracy, it changed how customers interacted with support.
Petter mentioned, “the agent has exceeded expectations—not only answering complex questions, but guiding customers, suggesting next steps, and driving more consistent use of our system.”
Coaching the Agent Like a Team Member
What distinguished Sticos's approach wasn't just deploying technology. It was how deliberately they shaped its behavior. When the company absorbed the new product line from the other Visma company, the knowledge base suddenly contained overlapping content. The same question, "How do I add a new user?", produced different answers depending on which product the customer was using.
Rather than accept confusion, Petter wrote detailed guidelines for the agent. He instructed it to check the source URL and ask customers which product they were using before pulling from the knowledge base. He tuned language settings so the agent responded in Norwegian by default, switching to English, Danish, or Swedish only when confident about the customer's language. This level of precision, treating the agent as a teammate that needed coaching rather than a tool that needed configuring, became the hallmark of Sticos's approach.
Turning Email from a Bottleneck into an Automated Channel
The team's boldest move was extending Customer Agent into email, their highest-volume, highest-risk channel. They studied which questions the agent handled well in chat, then cross-referenced those with the most common email inquiries. From that analysis, they built workflows that scanned incoming tickets for specific phrases like "I have forgotten my password" and "I can't find the login," automatically routing matching tickets to the agent.
The expansion was controlled and deliberate. Rather than routing all email to the agent, they started with questions where confidence was highest. Then they kept expanding coverage as performance data confirmed results.
Measuring What Couldn't Be Seen
To understand the true opportunity, Petter created a custom ticket property called "AI Potential." Every time a team member responded to a ticket, they tagged it: could the agent have handled this completely? Was there a knowledge base gap? Could it have helped prepare the ticket for a faster human response? The results showed roughly 20 percent of human-handled email tickets could be deflected, a finding that drove continuous expansion of the workflow.
Because Customer Agent operates within Service Hub, every automated interaction benefits from the full customer context within the CRM. This means the Customer Agent can easily pull CRM data to help end customers get quick answers and write to CRM properties as well, saving the Support Team time from manual data entry.
The Help Desk gave the team real-time dashboards for helpfulness, deflection, and resolution, making optimization a weekly discipline, and its shared default view let human support work seamlessly alongside Customer Agent without duplicating effort.
"We are constantly creating new articles and improving the old ones, making it better each day or week," Petter said. "If we make changes, we want to see the helpfulness improving, the handover rate getting lower."
The Transformation
Accountants Get Answers, Their Clients Get Results
The change is most visible not inside Sticos, but in the daily experience of the professionals who use their products. An auditor stuck on a compliance question at 8 PM, well past business hours, now gets an accurate, contextual answer in seconds instead of waiting until morning. Login issues that once required a multi-email exchange now resolve in a single chat interaction. The professionals who depend on Sticos can get back to the work their own clients are waiting for, faster and with less friction.
Beyond the Goal
The results surpassed the targets Petter had set. Customer Agent now handles 41 percent of all incoming support, exceeding the team's 40 percent goal. The chat deflection rate sits at 91 percent: nine out of every ten conversations fully managed without human intervention. Resolution holds at 75 percent. The helpfulness score, at 60 percent against a 60 percent target, tells a nuanced story. Petter's analysis found roughly 80 percent of negative ratings stem from product limitations rather than agent performance, and the score is trending upward as the team continues to expand the knowledge base.
The Real Stress Test
The true proof came when Sticos absorbed the transferred product line, approximately 25 new employees and 15,000 additional tickets from a team that had been running on different tools entirely. Without Customer Agent already handling the routine volume, absorbing that growth would have required significant additional hiring. Instead, the system held.
"A world without the agent now wouldn't be possible for us," Petter said.
From Watching the Queue to Knowing the Customer
The deepest transformation isn't operational. It's in how the team spends their days. Before Customer Agent, work was dictated by the queue: how many tickets, what kind of problems, how fast you could clear the backlog. The questions were repetitive, reactive, and relentless. Now, with the agent absorbing that routine volume, the tickets that reach human reps are the ones that genuinely need empathy, complex problem-solving, or a real conversation.
That shift has unlocked something Petter's team had long wanted but could never reach: the capacity to do actual customer success work. Team members now spend time identifying at-risk customers, conducting proactive outreach, and helping clients extract deeper value from the platform. That's the kind of engagement that drives retention and makes Sticos more valuable to the accounting professionals they serve.
Sticos estimates that with continued optimization, Customer Agent could eventually handle 55 to 60 percent of all incoming tickets. The company plans to implement health scoring and HubSpot's Customer Success Workspace next, extending the foundation they've built.
"It's like day and night," Petter said. "From watching the queue and answering repetitive, boring questions, to: 'this customer, they need a talk.'"
.png?width=120&height=120&name=Headshot%20Cards%20-%20Spotlight%202026%20Quotes%20(28).png){kind=avatar}
.png?width=215&height=50&name=RevenueWell_Logo%20(1).png)
.svg)
