Inside Laravel Customer Support With Feri Bartha  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Laravel Podcast]] - Full Title: Inside Laravel Customer Support With Feri Bartha - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2f84d753-c5cf-4bf2-b7b5-e955c156abe2 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Proactive Success Extends Support** - Feri defines customer success as the proactive work of monitoring, understanding goals, and reaching out to customers before problems arise. - Support handles reactive issues while success focuses on anticipating needs and preventing issues. Transcript: Matt Stauffer Fadi, can you say hi and just share a little bit about what you do every day at Laravel? Hey, everyone. Nice to meet you guys. Feri Bartha Well, 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. Yeah. Matt Stauffer 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 word. 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, right? You're not doing open source, right? Feri Bartha Yeah, exactly. It's only for the paid products. However, if somebody comes and asks about, you know, they have troubles with the framework, obviously we're not going to turn them away. But yes. Matt Stauffer You get them in touch with the right people. Exactly. Feri Bartha It's mainly about the paid products. I think the community is very used to, you know, open source, how it's being supported and what the mechanism is behind it and all that. Okay. Matt Stauffer And this is putting you in 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 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? Feri Bartha It's more of the proactive side of it, right? So it's not where the customer comes, but it's us, you know, proactively reaching out to the customer, proactively monitoring things and helping them and understanding their goals And challenges and try to address them proactively. ([Time 0:00:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e000fe4e-4a38-4772-b64b-2e38b3485eee)) - **From TradeShift To Leading Laravel Support** - Feri learned Laravel early via Andre while working at TradeShift and grew into roles spanning support, success, and professional services. - Andre later invited Feri to lead Laravel's support and success teams after a long-standing connection. Transcript: Feri Bartha Definitely. I'm going to try to keep it short. It 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, too messy for me. So I did PHP. And then at the company where TradeShift, where Andre and I worked together, he introduced me to it. So 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 boards, 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. Yeah. And then throughout from there, you know, just build further and further different teams, customer support, success, professional services, and so on. 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're doing and you know we are potentially looking for someone In to lead up the support team and success and if i would be interested and obviously i was i knew laravel for a long time ago i was yeah you know from the very beginning. And yeah, definitely. ([Time 0:02:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/acda4cd0-687c-47f0-b19c-a5e45e66d91d)) - **Assess And Prioritize With A Maturity Matrix** - Use a maturity matrix across tooling, process, people, and strategy to assess support readiness and prioritize gaps. - Build coverage, location strategy, and staffing to reduce ticket wait times from days to hours. Transcript: Feri Bartha 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, there 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 you know things that we needed to address so 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 always i have a bit of a kind of matrix starting from non-existent 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, you know, 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 that we needed a location strategy, coverage strategy. We needed more folks. We needed to look at technology and tech stack. So by now, the team is doing amazing. We are about 12 people on the team now. Wow. We are covering all time zones. We are working on finishing up on weekend as well, as you know. ([Time 0:04:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/61a425e4-07b5-4fd1-aefa-693e38ed8a92)) - **Coverage Trumps Raw Headcount** - Growing the team to cover all time zones and weekends transformed response SLAs from days to hours and restored community trust. - Staffing strategy matters as much as headcount for consistent global coverage. Transcript: Feri Bartha We are about 12 people on the team now. Wow. We are covering all time zones. We are working on finishing up on weekend as well, as you know. And as you felt 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. And by now, you know, the team has grown. We have multiple levels now. We have a great location strategy. ([Time 0:05:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/019d32dd-25f0-4feb-ab77-2d37c4553ddb)) - **Avoid The Boss Effect Through Delegation** - Prevent single points of failure by delegating product knowledge and promoting team leads to avoid the "boss effect." - Cross-train and create fallbacks so holidays or departures don't extend customer wait times. Transcript: Feri Bartha Yeah, those are very good 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. Feri Bartha If you own all the knowledge right if you are if i'm not delegating if i'm not bringing team leads and all that to like basically if i'm not training my replacement right then if the boss Matt Stauffer Hits me then all that process all that knowledge all of it is yeah of course so i thought you said the boss effect and i was like trying to put this together that's my fault still glad that You you described it though. The boss effect. Yeah, 100%. You want to make sure no one person is like the holder of all that knowledge. Yeah, exactly. Feri Bartha Exactly. So, and I think about that very strongly as well when it comes to, you know, the product knowledge. So, beside, you know, the product knowledge, we also need to think of, you know, fallbacks. Like you know if two people on the team goes for holiday do i want to have the customer suffered for two weeks being extended response time or do we want to invest and and make sure the community Feels that we are there so that's one 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, you know, if 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. Feri 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. You know, like how is the growth of the product? We've worked super close with the product teams. We have a level three setup as well, which is basically the product engineers. Every day there is someone on call from the engineering team who proactively jumps into tickets. ([Time 0:07:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aa0dd95d-add2-4bd3-bd0e-58db00e4292f)) - **Combine Knowledge Base, Sharing, And AI** - Maintain an internal knowledge base and run daily cross-training rituals like stand-ups and "aha" channels to share learnings. - Build an internal AI assistant on that knowledge to speed agent responses while keeping humans in the loop. Transcript: Feri Bartha Yeah, we constantly try to cross train. It's a continuous thing. We have our daily stand-ups and then the team shares each other. Have our dedicated channel for sharing it you know like we call them aha moments so like oh you know this is how i learned about it so we are constantly sharing it and then yes we we have an Internal knowledge base in in notion right now uh i'm also working on with with a couple of folks from the from the on trying to make like an internal AI agent to internal help, you know. So we are working on that as well. It'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. ([Time 0:10:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7604b392-4b90-44c6-b827-1444016eb705)) - **AI Augments, Not Replaces, Human Support** - AI should augment support agents by retrieving contextual product knowledge rather than replacing live human help. - Customers still often prefer an agent for nuanced or personal issues despite AI chat widgets. Transcript: Feri Bartha Like with the new version of Forge with the built-in 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. ([Time 0:11:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9bde511c-f611-41c1-8477-e018a4ff48e0)) - **Using Mintlify To Improve Docs And Search** - Laravel adopted Mintlify to enhance documentation search and to bring AI into docs for faster, more accurate answers. - The team tracks AI failures and converts gaps into GitHub issues for Taylor to review and merge fixes. Transcript: Feri Bartha 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 about documentation. It's amazing. Taylor, every single day, like I see PRs going through documentation, just a typo, Taylor approve, 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, you know, this tool is, you know, enhances search, brings, you know, the AI power into the amazing documentation We already have. But it really enhances the experience and the speed that users can can find information relevant information like all ais know about laravel by default by now right so this this documentation You know mintlyfy just enhances the the commercial product sides of things so yeah we do use mintlyfy i'm constantly also there looking at you know what our users are asking for, what Is the AI not able to respond. And then we create, you know, GitHub issues and then the team drafts it and then Taylor reviews them and emerges. ([Time 0:12:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/932b0f10-2f9e-4484-9915-f1aad1ee685a)) - **Proactively Audit Enterprise Usage** - For enterprise customers, proactively review usage metrics and suggest cost or scaling optimizations as part of success engagements. - Treat customer servers like your own to optimize cost, performance, and scale proactively. Transcript: Feri Bartha So it's, it's really, so, you know, because of the amount of customers and thousands of servers and whatnot, the proactive part is really tailored, you know, 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. The proactive part really comes in on the enterprise and the business level, right? Where we not just you know uh have uh every other week or once a month qbr or just status update with the customer but we actually look at okay let's let's see you know how much i don't know Like bandwidth how much compute how much size your your applications are using or or they are not using this or that or maybe maybe you you set up your auto scaling to scale to all the way To five but you you which means that you potentially paying for those resources but you don't actually need to so you could but just two or three like we can we basically consult them you Know so yeah it's a customer success and both support and customers We literally have the entire team as developers. So on second level, everybody is a developer with tons of experience of Laravel. With the caveat that they really have the people skills. They have the account management skills, the communication the yeah 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 treat any server any customer like it would be your server we all have our little apps treat them just like that so that you know they're optimized on on cost optimized On usage and and it allows them to scale. I hope that, you know, we're going to have thousands and thousands of customers with their billion dollar apps on Laravel Cloud or on Forge or whatnot, right? ([Time 0:14:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d9612bd3-8aff-430d-94a8-0eb87ca4c84a)) - **Founders Jump Into Tickets Too** - Taylor and Tom still jump into the ticketing system and sometimes process dozens of tickets quickly, which surprised the support team. - Feri says their involvement shows deep care for product quality and the community, motivating the team. Transcript: Feri Bartha This might going to be a bit funny. Matt Stauffer Okay. Feri Bartha So this is something that it's, you know, well, actually, there are multiple things. One is, you know, like when it comes to leading a team, as I mentioned, I'm constantly focused on enabling folks and making sure that, you know, I'm basically training my replacement Kind of goes against your brain sometimes and creates anxiety. But that's one of a big one is to constantly enable and enable and bring up and elevate the team members and see the potentials find the potentials in everyone 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 uh 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 we were like just oh 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 call that obviously he knows all of it because you know he's reviewing prs and everything and all but 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 but those there are those moments always like whenever i see taylor's Name in Ticketing System, I'm like, oh my God, what are we not doing right now? Matt Stauffer But it's just amazing. Feri Bartha 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. ([Time 0:18:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fe4e5f20-3677-4c77-a7e9-d56c5e97286d)) - **Artisan Desk: Hands-On Support At Laracon** - Laravel piloted an "Artisan Desk" at Laracon where attendees brought laptops for hands-on help with deployments and Nightwatch setups. - The desk exceeded expectations and involved engineers helping deep technical questions live on-site. Transcript: Feri Bartha I was wondering have you seen or walked by by any chance to artisan desk or the artisan desk at lara con i didn't know i was at our desk the whole time oh that's okay yeah i mean that explains It yeah you know we had a experiment let's put it that way okay to have to kind of like set up a the loraval version of genius bar type of thing um i i want to i've been talking with hank about It from the very beginning like since after i joined like oh you know we're 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 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 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 night watch and on site like it was an amazing experience oh that's so fun yeah so i'm hoping that you know we will try To have it more on the other uh laracons as well um obviously it was the first time no one really knew about it but we we want to try to to keep it up because it was so great like you know you know Like the all the other desk for more about demos and more about like very specific questions new products and all that yeah 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 even more that so it was it was amazing that's awesome yeah on the next one please come by yeah absolutely Matt Stauffer Yeah man i keep telling people i'm like when you're running a booth at lara con like i didn't see talks i didn't see the other booths i just sat there i'm like next year i i 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 were doing that. I definitely can't wait to check it out. Feri Bartha We were streaming from the desk, you know, streaming, streaming while doing watching the YouTube while ([Time 0:20:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/95abaf7d-7879-465b-9c3e-490ced55a9e3))