Using AI to improve Lemon Squeezy's Customer Support

‍

One of the many challenges of running a company like Lemon Squeezy, is the types of problems vary drastically. From tackling global sales tax compliance, fraudulent payments, to ensuring customer support is top-notch for our merchants and their customers. Each day brings new problems for us to solve.

When it comes to our customer support experience, the goal was simple — provide the best customer support with the emphasis on response times. Our intention is to always emphasize our surprise and delight to our customers with an amazing customer service experience is.

Back in February 2024, I started to to think through ways to improve Lemon Squeezy's customer support experience. Creating a best in class customer support experience will take time but we're aiming to improve this in various ways.

Test drive our AI support experience directly in our docs. Click the search bar and ask it anything from how to use Lemon Squeezy, the best way to prorate subscriptions, to even how to implement our SDKs. Try it now →

Idea #1 - Hire More

Hire. Hire. Hire.

Yes, we hired more support staff. But throwing more people at the problem isn’t the only answer. If we only approach solving our customer support experience with hiring more people, we never get the benefit of truly understanding what the core issues are. From improving our product, onboarding, refund flow, etc. we have the ability to learn with every interaction.

With that said, we have and will continue to hire more support reps for our team as Lemon Squeezy grows while always putting an emphasis on understanding why we're getting the types of tickets we do.

Idea #2 - Better segmentation

Our tickets are sporadic.

That’s putting it lightly.

Tickets flying in every minute from pre-sale questions, how to integrate our API, using our .js SDK, all the way to existing merchants with high volume that need our help.

And they need it fast.

For perspective, last month, we had 6,500+ merchants apply for new account approvals. That is a separate queue with a different priority. As it should be. Contrast that all DX questions. And at the top, high-volume merchants needing help. Different needs. Different expectations. You get the point.

As we work towards better segmentation of our customer inquiries we hope to gain the ability to solve users issues faster with more added context of their unique situation.

Idea #3 - Fresh paint

Yet another simple concept. Sometimes all you need is a refresh. We take a lot of pride in our UI/UX but we know we can always improve. As we continue on this journey to improved CX, we will be looking for ways to improve our self-service onboarding and in-app usability.

Our product touches a lot of the selling and buying experience when it comes to digital products. From payments, product delivery, billing management, license keys, refunds, etc. we want to make sure we continually improve every UX interaction.

Idea #4 - Implementing AI to our customer support experience

Final idea — leveraging AI.

For me personally, introducing AI was a delicate choice. Yes, the advancements in AI are amazing but a blanketed approach is short-sided.

As we thought through things with training AI on our docs, previous support replies, better search in our docs, improved in-app experience, etc. we started to understand what the experience for the customer would be. As exciting as this is, I don’t want customers feeling like they are talking to a robot. In fact, I want it to be very obvious you’re using AI with a visible “escape hatch” to get support from a human. In other words “hey, this is AI you’re talking to but if you want help from a human, click here.”

We are actively building solutions utilizing all the latest AI / LLM tooling.

AI is great. Humans are better.

It's important that everyone lean into the new and exciting things AI is affording us to accomplish. For us, integrating AI into our support channels and docs is strictly a supplement to our overall believe in providing great customer support. At the end of the day, you can always reach our support team directly at any time.

Overall, this is a great step forward in the right direction and we're excited to see how this unfolds over the year.

‍