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Inside Laravel Customer Support with Feri Bartha · The Laravel Podcast

• Matt Stauffer: Hello and welcome back to the Laravel podcast season seven. I'm your host, Matt Stauffer, the CEO of Tighten. And in this season, I'm joined every episode by a new member of the Laravel team. Today I'm talking to Feri Bartha, the director of customer success and support at Laravel. Feri, can you say hi and just share a little bit about what you do every day at Laravel? Ferenc Bartha: Hey everyone, nice to meet you guys. You know, running support and success, it's all about the community, bringing and helping all customers and the Laravel community to bring out all the amazing features and capacities that Laravel can provide. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, and so your job in customer success and support, and we'll get to more of this in a minute, but just to make it clear, because often the job titles people say are job titles we're all super familiar with in the developer world. And I bet that your job title is a very familiar one in the SaaS world. But let's just kind of talk about it. Customer success and support, are you primarily responsible for that customer success and support for the paid products, I assume? You're not doing open source, right? Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, exactly. It's only for the paid products. However, if somebody comes and asks about how they have troubles with the framework, obviously we're not going to turn them away. But yes, it's mainly about the paid products. Matt Stauffer: OK. Yeah, you get them in touch with the right people. Yeah. Yeah. Ferenc Bartha: I think the community is very used to open source, how it's being supported and what the mechanisms behind it and all that. Matt Stauffer: Okay, and this is putting you on the spot a little bit, but and then I'll get into the planned questions. But if you think about the difference between customer support and customer success, when I hear customer support, I say, I hear customer has a question, we answer the question, or if there's a bug, we fix the bug, right? That's kind of clear. Can you tell me a little bit more about the success part? Like, what does that mean to you? Ferenc Bartha: It's more of the proactive side of it. So it's not where the customer comes, but it's us proactively reaching out to the customer, proactively monitoring things and helping them and understanding their goals and challenges and try to address them proactively. Matt Stauffer: Okay, I want to talk about that more later. I'm going to put it on our agenda. But first, I'm going to ask the question you know is coming, which is, could you tell us a little bit about your backstory of what you know, what was your journey to coming to Laravel? Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, definitely. I'm going to try to keep it short. It's kind of...intervenes in certain places with Andre as he mentioned as well. But yeah, I got introduced to Laravel by Andre. So after college, I did my bachelor's in PHP while everybody in the class was Java and C++. I was like, no way, it's too messy for me. So I did PHP. And then at the company where trade shift, where Andre and I worked together, he introduced me to it. So... Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Ferenc Bartha: He joined the team and we needed to build out various tools and he left PHP and then Laravel and then he introduced me to it. So while I was writing in his board spaghetti front end code in Blade and all that, he was writing the backend and so on and then we managed to build out a team for him. But yeah, and then throughout from there, you know, just build further and further different teams, customer support, success, professional services, and so on. And then, like about a year ago or something, Andre pinged me, hey, how you doing? We obviously talk in general, but he was like, hey, how you doing? And, you know, we are potentially looking for, for someone to lead up the support team and success, if I will be interested. And obviously I was, I knew Laravel for a long time ago. was, you know, from the very beginning. yeah, definitely. So that's how I landed. Yeah, had a great conversation with Tom and Taylor and Hank and yeah, that's in short. Matt Stauffer: I love that. So when when when Laravel first existed, customer support was somebody DMing, you know, Taylor. And I know over time, as they started building a team, various members of the development team would also kind of take on the responsibility for customer support. I can't remember if there was ever any dedicated customer support folks, but certainly not at your level of building an actual team. What is it like to build a customer support team completely from scratch where there wasn't a formalized one there? Did you feel like you were inheriting anything or you feel like, blank slate. Ferenc Bartha: I did inherit a little bit. So like you write so up till last year summer, there were no dedicated team and then somewhere in the middle of the summer or beginning of summer last year, a couple of folks have joined Laravel as support. And then at the time when I joined, were only two team members dedicated for support. So yeah, it was very much from scratch. There were some processes. There were a lot of gaps and things that we needed to address. I usually like to, whenever I join a company, I like to, I don't know if you maybe do it as well on the CEO level, right? So like, I have a bit of a kind of matrix from starting from nonexistent, five bullets point all the way up to existing, adopted, and scalable. And then run that through a spreadsheet or on paper across every single topic, tooling, process, people, strategy, and so on. So the goal is obviously get to this and then start from there. So it was very, very apparent from day one that we needed a location strategy, coverage strategy. We needed more folks. We needed to look at Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm. Ferenc Bartha: say technology and tech stack. So by now the team is doing amazing. We are about 12 people on the team now. We are covering all time zones. We are working on finishing up on... Matt Stauffer: Wow. Ferenc Bartha: weekend coverage as well. As you know, and as you found at Laracon, the community is very vibrant. And especially, you know, like, hobby developers, I have my little app as well that I'm, you know, vibing on here and there. And obviously, I'm going to do that on the weekend. But if it goes down and I can't reach out to my hosting provider, then that's not good. So I want to make sure that we provide, you know, basically 24 coverage. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Ferenc Bartha: And by now, you know, the team has grown. We have multiple levels now. We have a great location strategy. Our feedback or DSRs has been growing up quite a bit. You know, when I joined, like... We had tickets that were waiting in queue to be responded, obviously, because of the dev team and then the dev teams were trying to help that were six days old or two weeks old or whatnot. Now we are down to hours and max a day or something like that. So super fast-paced. We really want to make sure that the community feels that we are there all the way. Matt Stauffer: One of my questions was going to be, how do you know? Because one of the things that's very interesting with a consultancy is, you know, ask the question of when are you ready to hire? And my business partner and I, know, when he still worked at Tighten, there was a lot of conversations around, he'd be like, hey, you know, should you hire a developer? And I'd say, well, I don't know, what do the finances tell us? And it's very interesting for me, the metrics for you of like, when do you need another customer support agent? And I imagine there's at least two components, but I want to hear your answer. The two I imagine are, you know, how quickly do tickets get turned around and what kind of coverage do we have across the whole week. Are those right that those are factors and there are other factors you think about? Like how do you know when you have the right size team? Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, those are very good, the default ones, but then because we have so many different products, right? It's if I create specializations, which we obviously in a certain level we do, then I'm one on one running into a boss effect. You know the boss effect, right? Matt Stauffer: No, tell me more. Ferenc Bartha: So if you own all the knowledge, right? If you are, if I'm not delegating, if I'm not bringing in team leads and all that to like basically if I'm not training my replacement, right, my then if the bus hits me, then all that process all that knowledge all of it is gone. So I'm no, no, no bus like commuter bar. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, of course. I'm sorry, I thought you said the boss effect and I was like trying to put this together. That's my fault. Still glad that you described it though, the boss effect. Yeah, 100%. You wanna make sure no one person is like the holder of all that knowledge. Yeah. Ferenc Bartha: Exactly, exactly. and I can think about that very... strongly as well when it comes to the product knowledge. So, the product knowledge, we also need to think of fallbacks. So, if two people on the team goes for a holiday, do I want to have the customer suffer for two weeks being extended response time, or do we want to invest and make sure the community feels that we are there? So, that's one. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah. Ferenc Bartha: And then obviously when you create multiple tiers, then like first level and second level, which we have now, then it comes in automations, right? I like to automate as much as possible, help the team and so on. Yeah, and then the other one is really the time zone and coverage we want, right? So example, if you want to have weekend coverage as well, like full-time weekend coverage, not like an on-call dev, which we started with at the very beginning, know, with like certain enterprise customers, if they create a ticket, you know, Grafana calls you immediately on the phone. But we want to get to the point where it's like full-on staffed weekend as well. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, that's cool. Ferenc Bartha: So it's really like all the matrix of all that. It's a tricky one, right? And then you need to also look at how many accounts are created every day, know, like how is the growth of the product. We've worked super close with the product teams. They are even, we have a level three setup as well, which is basically the product engineers. There is every day, there is someone on call from the engineering team who proactively jumps into tickets, Matt Stauffer: 10:38.252) Nice. That's very cool. Ferenc Bartha: you know we can we can anytime ask for help and they're always there. Matt Stauffer: That's very cool. So one of the things you mentioned that I wanted to type in a little bit more is what the experience is like of offering customer support and building a team that's supporting multiple products. Do you have knowledge? So two questions I had and I want to curious what else you can say about my two questions were, do you have knowledge bases that are folks? Because I feel like nobody can really know everything about all of them. So there are tools like a notebook, L.M. or something like that that people are using to pull that information out. And the second question is, do people specialize on specific products or does everybody know every product? Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, we constantly try to cross train. Like it's a continuous thing. Like we have our daily standups and then the team shares each other. We have our dedicated channel for sharing it. You know, like we call them aha moments. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Ferenc Bartha: So like, you know, this is how I learned about it. So we are constantly sharing it. And then yes, we have an internal knowledge base in Notion right now. I'm also working on with a couple of folks from the team on trying to make like an internal AI agent to internal help, you know. So we are working on that as well. That's gonna be a bit, that's very exciting because it has so many data points. And you met Ashley, to have Ashley as the AI guru, it's freaking amazing. So I'm very excited about that project. Matt Stauffer: That's very fun. And one of the fun things about something like that is because often, you know, when people replace customer service with AI, then it's a worse experience for everybody. But when you use AI as a tool to make the jobs of the actual people doing customer service easier, it's basically just I keep telling people like AI is not to replace people, it's to augment the work people are already doing. And so when AI becomes not a replacement to customer service people, but instead a tool that make information retrieval easier for those customer service people. Now everybody wins instead of already losing. I'm like, this is great. That's very cool. Ferenc Bartha: Exactly, exactly. And like you probably saw in the demo, right, like with the new version of Forge with the built-in, you know, in the comment bar, like you can literally ask anything and then the AI, you know, builds out directly from the knowledge base. It's all contextual, knows everything about Laravel, knows everything about Forge and your setup and just can respond great stuff to you. But you're right, if you have, you know, we all have our custom tools. I have my spaghetti code. know, like, I, you know, the AI doesn't. So, so I need to talk to a person and then and then, you know, ask questions. And obviously, yes, we we're gonna use tools, AI tools to, to speed our process, speed up the process, and so on. Yeah, you're completely right. We actually had a couple of tickets come in because there was a chat widget in products and then they are like, literally the first sentence was like, I want to talk to an agent. Yeah. Matt Stauffer: I get it. So one of the things that, and I didn't follow up on this because I knew I was going to be talking to you. So I was like, I'm not going to look. I'm going let him tell me. But I saw something about MintLify. And I just said, that's a product I'm not familiar with. I know it's something to do with documentation. I know there was something exciting about it. I'm going to wait until I talk to Feri about it. what is What is MintLify and how are you all using it? Are you still using it? OK. Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, we are still using it. So when I joined, as I mentioned, you know, we went through the tech stacks and whatnot. And one of the things when it comes to support and success, it's really a big focus for me that constantly needs to be an eye on is the self-service documentation and all that. Right. And obviously, you know, we all know a lot of our documentation. It's amazing. Taylor every single day. Like I see PRs going through documentation, just a typo. Taylor approved. Merge. But it really comes down to the tooling as well, not just to the content. So when I came in, we looked at a couple of tools and we showed it to Taylor that this tool enhances search, brings the AI power into the amazing documentation we already have, but it really enhances the experience and the... the speed that users can find information, relevant information. All AIs know about Laravel by default by now, So these documentation, Mintlify just enhances the commercial product sites of things. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Ferenc Bartha: So yeah, we do use Mintlify. I'm constantly also there looking at what our users are asking for, what is the AI not able to respond, and then we create GitHub issues, and then the team drafts it, and then Taylor reviews them and emerges. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, well, and that's a perfect transition because I wanted to talk more about what you're talking about with proactive kind of like help for your clients and customers. So one of the things that you mentioned here was you proactively say when somebody searches for something, it doesn't get a good answer. That's a ding ding ding that we want to make that future searches there. I love that. What other kind of proactive things are you able to do to kind of look out for either future or even current problems that people are having? Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, so it's really, so... you know, because of the amount of customers and thousands of thousands of servers and whatnot. The proactive part is really tailored, you know, when you when you look at, you know, your ICPs, your ideal customer profiles and how you tier things and services just like the business plans and pricing plans. We the proactive part really comes in on the enterprise and the business level. Right. So where we not just, you know, have every other week or once a month QBR or just status update with the customer, but we actually look at, let's see how much. I don't know, like bandwidth, how much compute, how much size your applications are using or they are not using this or that. Maybe you set up your auto scaling to scale to 5, which means that you're potentially paying for those resources, but you don't actually need to. So you could put just two or three. We basically consult them. It's a customer success and both support and customers will literally have the entire team is developers. So like on second level everybody is a developer with tons of experience of Laravel. With the caveat that they really have the people skills, have the account management skills, communication skills, the... Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Ferenc Bartha: and the interest to solve problems and to work with customers. So it's really easy with these guys that, you know, like I always tell them like, tweet any server, any customer, like it would be your server. We all have our little apps, tweet them just like that so that, you know, they're Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I love that. Ferenc Bartha: optimized on cost, optimized on usage, and it allows them to scale. I hope that we're have thousands and thousands of customers with their billion dollar apps on Laravel Cloud or on Forge or whatnot, right? And that's really the goal. Matt Stauffer: Well, that's really cool because one of the things that I think of is some of the best advice I've gotten for how to treat your customers when you're initially starting a SaaS is to do things for your customers in the early days that you know you can't sustain when you have thousands of customers because that allows you to build these kind of really attached customers and really who you get to you understand things better about what they need. So it's like you're learning from them and gaining from them while you're giving them exceptional service. And then of course when you get to a certain number of clients, you just can't do that. And I've always thought of that as a bummer, right? Like you hit this moment where you're like, well, we can't do this anymore. And so, and you know, I think it's really cool to be able to build a space in which you're like, hey, we're still able to do that. We can't do it for everybody, but we can say, hey, like it justifies doing it. If somebody's spending at a certain level, then we can justify it from like a cost of our customer support people, whatever. But at some point there are some people who are using our tool the most and we want to make sure that those people are having the most positive benefit from it. And you still kind of get that. That it, it's a special attention to them, but then it's also an opportunity for you all to actually have like a little bit more of like a hands-on practical kind of experience point, which I think is really helpful for, you know, for customer support reps. Okay. Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Matt Stauffer: I had one last question for you today, which is, is there one thing that you can think of that we as the non-customer support running members of the Laravel community would not imagine that is a part of doing customer support? And this could be the nitty gritty, yes, it could be the most esoteric, but there's some part or some challenge you had to overcome or just some day-to-day thing that you're like, I don't know if people understand that this is a part of what we do. Ferenc Bartha: Okay, this might gonna be a bit funny, but so this is something that it's... Well, actually there are multiple things. One is when it comes to leading a team. As I mentioned, I'm constantly focused on enabling folks and making sure that I'm basically training my replacement. It of goes against your brain sometimes and creates anxiety. But that's one of the big ones is to constantly enable and enable and bring up and elevate the team members and see the potentials, find the potentials in everyone. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Ferenc Bartha: And then the other thing that's specific to Laravel is that, you know, both Tom as well as Taylor gets into, you know, goes into the ticketing system now and then. And after Cloud and Nightwatch lunch, it kind of made us all embarrassed a little bit. Like the entire team, were like, just, ooh. Taylor goes in and within like I don't know like maybe 45 minutes he crushed like 40 50 tickets like I'm like oh my god and then and then everybody was like calm down calm down obviously he knows all of it because you know he's reviewing PR's and everything and all but it was we were just feeling the entire thing we were just a bit embarrassed but then you know we pushed you know really heavily pushed through it and yeah Matt Stauffer: Ha ha ha ha ha! Ferenc Bartha: But there are those moments always, like whenever I see Taylor's name in the ticketing system, I'm like, my God, what are we not doing right again? Matt Stauffer: huh, he's starting sweating. We can't keep up! huh. Ferenc Bartha: But it's just amazing. Exactly. But it's so amazing that he cares so much about the community. He cares so much about the product, maturity and stability and everything. You like all the PRs and the tickets. I'm like, you know, you see sometimes people respond like, this is actually Taylor responding to me? Matt Stauffer: Like, no, yeah, he does that. Ferenc Bartha: It's yeah, he does that and yeah, because he's amazing and the same with Tom as well, he's Always in there looking at all the feedbacks from customers and all that Yeah, I Don't know if that did that answer your question. Matt Stauffer: Love that. Great. Well, that was a fantastic answer. I love it. I appreciate it very much. Then my always last question on the podcast is, is there anything that we didn't get to today you wanted to make sure we got a chance to cover? Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, I was wondering, have you seen or walked by by any chance the artisan desk at Laracon? Matt Stauffer: I didn't, no, I was at our desk the whole time. Ferenc Bartha: That's okay. Yeah, I mean that explains it. But yeah, you know, we had a experiment, let's put it that way, to have to kind of like set up the Laravel version of Genius Bar type of thing. Matt Stauffer: Okay, tell me more. Ferenc Bartha: I wanted I wouldn't talking with Hank about it from the very beginning like well since after I joined like you know be going to the EU Laracon we didn't have time for all that but for the US one, let's try it out. So the whole purpose for the for the artisan desk was that you know any customer on site can come with any support questions any consulting questions, anything they can actually bring their laptop and you know, we were very scared about I was very scared about it. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Yeah. Ferenc Bartha: but then it ended up blowing out any and all expectations. Like it was amazing. Like we were so, so busy. We literally had people with their computers, you know, setting up Cloud, deploying, setting up Nightwatch and on site. Like it was an amazing experience. Yeah. So I'm hoping that, you know, we will try to have it more on the other Saracens as well. Obviously, Matt Stauffer: That's amazing. Ferenc Bartha: It was the first time no one really knew about it. But we want to try to keep it up because it was so great. You know, like all the other desks were more about demos and more about like very specific questions, new products and all that. On our side, it was like literally hands on, like in depth, like with, you know, engineers, sometimes even the product engineers came over and to even more that. So it was amazing. Yeah, on the next one, please come by and say hi. Yeah. Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Man, I keep telling people, I'm like, when you're running a booth at Laracon, like I didn't see talks, I didn't see the other booths, I just sat there. I'm like, next year, and to be clear, my Titan team did an incredible job at the booth and I'm so grateful for them, you know, but I need to get out more and I need to go see things more. But that's such a clever idea. I'm really glad you're doing that. I definitely can't wait to check it out. Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, yeah. We were streaming from the desk, you know, streaming, streaming while doing, yeah, while doing tickets in breaks. Matt Stauffer: Uh-huh. just watching the YouTube. Yeah, that's awesome. That's so good. Well, that's it for me. So I really, really appreciate you joining. And obviously we are all seeing the day. Well, those of us who are paying customers, we get to see the daily benefit of the work that you all are doing, your customer support work. And it sounds like actually some folks who are just doing open source work still get to see the benefit of the training that you all are doing and everything. And yeah, man, it's great to meet you. Ferenc Bartha: Yeah, it's great to meet you too, Matt. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Matt Stauffer: Okay, and for the rest of you, of course, the rest of you, thank you so much for hanging out, and we'll see you next time. Ferenc Bartha: Bye.