Homebase serves Main Street: restaurants, retail shops, doggy daycares, and auto mechanics—small businesses where the owner is often the entire HR, payroll, and IT department rolled into one.
The workforce management platform faced an impossible value equation: their customers needed 24/7 support for mission-critical issues like running payroll or publishing schedules, yet the economics of serving price-sensitive small businesses didn’t support always-on coverage.
"Our business is entirely based on trust," says Ray Sandza, Chief Strategy Officer at Homebase. "Our customers pick us because they trust us to get things right, but they also trust that we are there for them when they need us."
For years, Homebase offered voice support—a rarity in their market—but only 12 hours a day, five days a week. More comprehensive coverage would have broken their value equation. Less would have broken their customers' trust.
AI changed the math. Homebase chose Sierra to power their AI agent, transforming how they deliver support while uncovering massive unmet customer needs.
The Main Street challenge
Homebase's customers are owner-operators running businesses with hourly teams—entrepreneurs who opened businesses to serve their communities, not to master workforce compliance.
"Folks don't have departments of specialists," Sandza explains. "All those departments are the owner of the business and maybe a manager wearing multiple hats. And importantly, this is not why they opened the business. They want to serve customers and deliver great service and help the community, not to run payroll compliantly."
When a bakery owner is opening up at 3 or 4 in the morning and runs into an issue with the schedule or time clock, email and chat feel inadequate—Homebase's support team, doesn't start until 8 AM. Voice support became non-negotiable, even as it limited Homebase's ability to scale.
"I view customer support as an extension of the software product and it needs to be available all of the time," Sandza says. "There was this tension in being able to have people always available, always knowing the answer, while always being the best value in the market."
Choosing Sierra to power their AI agent
When Homebase decided to bring AI into their product suite, customer support emerged as the obvious starting point. They evaluated building the agent themselves, compared multiple vendors, and ultimately chose Sierra.
"Sierra really cared about us," Sandza recalls. "I really value people that take design partnerships seriously. The way that they build is very aligned. It’s built based on outcomes—they’re not going to charge if they don't actually help the customer."
Building intelligence, not just automation
The Homebase team, also referred to as “Homies,” methodically built out journeys, starting with contained use cases and expanding as quality metrics proved consistent. The AI agent evolved to become deeply relevant: when a customer opens support from the payroll page, it proactively surfaces the three most probable payroll questions.
The agent also personalizes its approach based on who it's talking to. "We might give a bit more hand-holding if you’re a newer Homebase customer," says Ashlee Booker, Senior Manager of CX Operations at Homebase. "We understand the customer experience based on their profile and built it into Sierra that way."
The agent handles everything from "How do I add an employee?" to complex product features. For Homebase's earned wage access product—which lets hourly employees access wages before payday—the agent now handles a 6x increase in requests. These requests simply weren't being made before.
The agent also identifies opportunities to deliver additional value after resolving issues. "We've set it up so that as a customer references hiring, we answer the question, but then also let them know about our new hiring product," Sandza explains. The agent offers demos and books calls with the sales team—cross-selling previously impossible given support team bandwidth.
Uncovering massive hidden demand
Once the agent went live, questions that customers had been quietly sitting on started surfacing.
"Before, people would let some things slip by," Sandza says. "There were just more latent questions and areas that we could help customers with. Being able to say 'Hey, this is really easy and accessible. You can do it from a noisy place on your own time. Sunday at 1 AM, if you have a question, you can ask'—that has actually pulled a lot more questions out of the woodwork."
The agent now resolves 70% of all inquiries fully and autonomously, typically within minutes. The impact: Employee inquiries have increased 6x, and inquiries from business owners are up 70%. And yet the actual number of tickets that the support team needs to handle per person has decreased by over two-thirds. Meanwhile, customer satisfaction scores for agent-handled inquiries match those for support rep interactions.
Restoring humanity to support work
With more than two-thirds of repetitive volume handled automatically, support reps now focus on genuinely complex problems that help foster strong relationships.
"The fact that AI can take away the majority of the work that actually can be just done in an automated way actually gives humanity and agency back to these individuals," Sandza reflects.
Crucially, career paths have expanded. Three former support reps have been elevated to roles managing the AI system and building journeys—effectively becoming junior AI engineers. "Our customer support team is shaping what Sierra will be and how it can handle issues," Sandza says.
Cassidy Edwards, Director of AI Enablement and HRBP at Homebase, has seen the same shift in her own career: she started as an HR business partner and now leads AI enablement companywide. "AI's helped enable that for them," she says of Homies moving into more technical roles. "It's not something that's going to take over all my tasks—I'm going to be able to elevate in my own role."
Homebase is explicit: they're not using Sierra to reduce headcount, but to remove what makes support work grinding and restore what makes it meaningful.
Building trust for the AI future
For Homebase, Sierra represents more than operational improvement—it's building trust for their larger mission to "bring AI to Main Street." Homebase has set an internal goal of saving customers an aggregate 100 million hours this year through AI by automating tasks like optimizing schedules, tracking down when employees actually clocked out, reviewing payroll line by line, and screening job candidates.
Customer support with Sierra provides the proof point that Homebase implements AI responsibly and effectively.
As Sandza puts it: "Sierra helped us get a world-class AI product in our customers' hands very quickly, which builds the trust and reputation that when Homebase says they can use this new technology to help deliver business value for you, you can trust us."
