How Replit scaled support to millions of users

Meet Travis

Travis leads support at Replit, where millions of people build apps and websites by chatting with an AI agent.

His first job was in sales, selling Apple computers. He hated it and quickly moved over to the Genius Bar to do technical support, and as he puts it, “the rest is just kind of history”.

That history led him to Replit, where Michele Catasta, the company’s President, hired him. “Luckily, I hired Travis,” Michele says. “He’s amazing. He created an incredible support team.”

Joining a rocket ship

If Travis had to describe Replit, he would say “rocket ship”.

He is also open about what he walked into. When he joined, the common narrative on social media was a question, “does Replit have a support team?”, and a couple thousand tickets were waiting in the backlog. He hates admitting that publicly, but to him “it’s important to talk about where we came from”.

That is a long way from where the team is today. Most customers now have their issues resolved well within 48 hours, and Pro and premium users generally within 24.

Meet Quinn

Part of that team is Quinn, the AI customer agent Replit built on Parahelp.

Travis had his concerns about putting AI in front of customers. His biggest was always accuracy, hallucinations, and what the customer experience would be like.

Then there is a post he still remembers. A customer wrote about Quinn, the support agent who had helped them, and how thankful they were.

For Travis, it addressed one of the big concerns he came in with.

“I just don’t want customers to feel like they’re talking to a robot, and they don’t.”
- Travis

Fixing the issue behind the ticket

For Travis, resolving tickets is one part of the job. It matters as much to him that the team helps fix the issue behind a ticket, so fewer customers run into it.

Michele sees it the same way and loves talking to users “because there is a lot to learn”. Replit’s paid users are invested in the product and want it to work, so when they hit a blocker, they tell the team what is broken.

“The complaints from our paid users are the highest signal we could ever get.”
- Michele

To pick up that signal, a couple of people on Travis’s team run analyses with Parahelp and turn them into a support insights report, which is shared with the whole company in Slack.

A recent one showed a spike in deployment-related tickets. At first, the team couldn’t get to the bottom of it. But the trend data from their Parahelp reporting led to a discussion with the engineering team responsible for deployments, and Replit has since seen “a huge decline” in deployment-related tickets.

More time for the long tail

Today, Quinn handles much more of the ticket volume than before, and the team recently hit an auto-resolution rate of over 80% in a single week.

That frees up the people on Travis’s team to focus on other things, and Michele knows where that time should go. It is the long tail of issues, where Replit tries to be “as white glove as we can”, so that users feel confident they can grow with the platform.

Travis’s recommendation to other teams:

“If you need to move quickly, you’re ramping quickly, Parahelp is just the right solution for you.”
- Travis