How Kit folded 9 years of internal tools into their AI support agent

• AI support agent: Sam

• Connected tools: Retool, Stripe, API endpoints, MCP servers

• Key stats

  • Sam’s CSAT score: 92%

  • Sam’s resolution rate: 70.3%

  • Sam’s resolution rate (of all tickets): 63.5%

Summary

Last month, Sam, Kit’s AI support agent, resolved 63.5% of all of Kit’s support tickets with an average CSAT score of 92%. Kit’s support team built Sam on Parahelp and runs it without relying on engineers. This is the story of how Miguel, after spending nine years building internal tools so his teammates could do what only he could, taught it all to Sam.

Meet Miguel

Kit is the platform thousands of creators rely on to run their businesses. Because Kit is so critical to creators, the relationship feels more like a partnership than a tool.

Miguel started at Kit in 2017, hired as a support engineer to handle “any customer issues that our frontline support team couldn't handle”. Those issues often required taking action across different systems, such as their billing system and their internal database.

He began his professional career as a teacher before pivoting into tech, which would eventually benefit him significantly in building Sam, Kit’s AI support agent.

Building internal tools

As Kit’s customer base continued to grow, the support team’s workload kept increasing, and they had to find ways to scale output without sacrificing quality. Handling complex issues alone, Miguel was one of the first to feel the pressure.

After handling customer issues manually for some time, Miguel had built playbooks outlining how to resolve the issues, including which actions to take in which systems.

The challenge was just that no one else could follow those playbooks, because Miguel was the only one with the technical capabilities to perform the relevant actions within their systems. To solve this, Miguel began building internal tools and teaching non-technical team members how to use them to perform those actions easily and safely.

Over the next nine years, Miguel built internal tools that enabled the team to perform 140 actions across different systems.

“I was trying to duplicate my abilities for other people to be able to do things.”

Building Sam

In 2023, Miguel began experimenting with early AI support solutions. While a few showed promise in answering FAQs, Miguel couldn’t connect any of them to his internal tools to take actions to resolve complex issues.

That changed in fall 2024, when Miguel found Parahelp and started building Sam.

Miguel started by connecting the most-used internal tools from his nine years of building, many built on Retool - along with Kit’s help center, internal playbooks in Notion, and historical support tickets in Intercom.

"It's been great to be able to take the work that I've done in the last nine plus years and not have to start over. I can just basically fold those tools that already exist and just give Sam a way to push the button."⁠

After internal testing and a few iterations, Miguel and the team launched Sam to customers via email and live chat on October 17, 2024.

Within the first 10 days, Sam replied to 1,394 tickets and resolved 721 (51.7% resolution rate), with an average CSAT score of 91.4% from 187 rated conversations and reactions like “You so graciously helped me set this up, Sam!”. And the numbers have only climbed since.

Miguel’s favorite customer interactions

Since then, Miguel and the team have continued building on Sam, constantly enabling it to do more and more.

One of Miguel’s favorite types of customer interactions is when Sam helps customers recover accidentally deleted subscribers. Because subscribers are the core of a creator’s email business, customers who delete them by mistake reach out to support "writing in a panic."

To build this, Miguel prompted Parahelp to build a connection to an internal tool that enables Sam to restore these subscribers: when a customer reaches out, Sam asks a couple of clarifying questions about the accidental deletion and then restores the deleted subscribers.

Historically, customers would panic for hours before the Kit team could recover the subscribers. Now, Sam can do it for them instantly.

Those customer interactions are often the ones that earn the most customer love.

In the last month, Sam resolved over 63.5% of all Kit’s support tickets, with an average CSAT score of 92%.

Everyone got a promotion

Not only has Sam been well received by Kit’s customers, but it has also had a significant positive impact on the team. As Miguel puts it, “it’s like everyone in frontline support has gotten a promotion because we're asking you to do much higher-level thinking”.

Today, team members mostly spend their time handling edge cases that Sam hands off and teaching Sam how to resolve them the next time, which even non-technical team members can do by just chatting with Parahelp in Slack or the Parahelp platform.

"Parahelp is very intuitive. It requires very little back-and-forth to go from an idea to 'okay, we're ready to launch it to our AI support agent'. Building comes with guardrails that make it less scary to ship.”

In a way, Miguel never stopped teaching. It started with students, then his teammates through the internal tools he built - and now Sam, who remembers every lesson.