Customer support

You can build a good company by focusing on getting lots of customers. To build a great company, you must delight your existing customers. This means that the journey doesn't simply end once we sign up a user - even more important is to ensure that PostHog is consistently delivering value for them.

How we ensure amazing customer support

It's easy for customers to reach us

We have a few different routes for users to contact us. As an open source company, our bias is towards increasing the bandwidth of communication with our users and making it easy for them to reach us through a clearly defined, simple set of channels.

These are the ways in which customers can currently reach us:

Support ticket - Customers can create a support ticket directly within the PostHog app, under the help menu. This offers both users and PostHog engineers the best possible experience as Zendesk is automatically populated with a bunch of helpful context that makes troubleshooting easier. When in doubt, customers should be directed here.
Community questions - users can also search previously answered questions that have been asked anywhere on posthog.com in our Docs. This is a great way to help us improve our Docs for simpler use-case type questions, but more complex questions should be re-routed via a support ticket.
Dedicated Slack channels - For higher-paying (or potential higher-paying) customers, we offer a dedicated channel on our main company Slack.

Sometimes people reach out to us with support issues on Twitter/X. Regardless of whether someone reaches out to your personal account or to the company account the broad approach should be as follows:

Check first if they already have a ticket in Zendesk (either in-app or via /questions). There is nothing more annoying for a user than being asked to create a support ticket if they already have. If you don't have Zendesk access, ask someone in CS.
If no tickets exist, explain that we can't provide support over social media and ask them to create a support ticket within the app - this is much better than trying to solve their problem over Twitter as Zendesk pulls in a bunch of contextual information and is easier to collaborate in. Do this from the PostHog Twitter account - otherwise you will get personally contacted every time this user wants help.
If yes, say that we can see their ticket and reassure them that all tickets are triaged and responded to. Let CS know that you have done this. Again, use the PostHog Twitter account.

Your objective should be to get the conversation into Zendesk ASAP, because it's easier to help the person there and to avoid setting a precedent that complaining visibly on social media results in an expedited response. An exception to this rule is if you are engaging with someone who has provided general feedback about PostHog - feel free to use your personal account if someone has a feature request or similar. If a user engage in a way which causes you any distress, you can skip all of the above and just highlight it in Slack for CS to deal with.

Sometimes users ask about the progress of certain issues that are important to them on GitHub. We don't consider GitHub to be a proper 'support' channel, but it is a useful place to gauge the popularity of feature requests or the prevalence of issues.

We send out CSAT surveys after a ticket has been closed for at least 3 days using this Automation. The emails contain a link to https://survey.posthog.com/ with their distinct_id, ticketId, and the assigned team as query parameters, which are being used alongside their satisfaction rating to capture a survey sent event. The code for the survey website is in the PostHog-csat repo and the responses can be viewed in this dashboard.

Support is done by actual engineers

All support at PostHog is done by actual, full-time engineers. We have two types of engineers:

Support engineers, who are focused solely on support across multiple products and sit in the Support team
Product engineers, who are focused on products and take on support responsibilities in a support hero rotation

What do Support Engineers do?

Right now, support engineers provide the first level of support for the following products:

Product analytics
Web analytics
Session replay
Feature success
Support
Data warehouse
Customer Success

Support engineers respond to and solve as many tickets as they can for these products, or escalate tickets to the appropriate product engineer if needed. For all other products, the engineers on those teams are directly responsible for support. The support runbook is maintained on the Support Hero page.

When we hire new support engineers they will usually spend the first few weeks focused just on product and web analytics tickets, until they've started to build more familiarity with the platform as a whole. Afterwards, they join the Support Zero rotation.

What do Support Heroes do?

One person on each product team takes on the Support Hero role each week. This is a rotating responsibility, where the person involved spends a significant chunk of their time responding to support queries across Slack, email and Zendesk, and sharing that feedback with the team and/or building features and fixes in response. We find each stint as Support Hero throws up a lot of really valuable feedback.

Support isn't just about tickets

Supporting our customers isn't just about solving tickets, and we don't judge the success of support engineers solely by how many tickets solve. Instead, we free up support engineers to spend at least one day a week as a Support Zero, when they can work on other tasks which help users. These tasks can include working on their quarterly goals, analyzing team performance, building new support features, tasks from our Big Ideas list, or whatever else they think will help us move faster.

The current rotation for Support Zero is:

Monday: Nobody Tuesday: Steven Steven ShultsSteven Shults Wednesday: Abigail Abigail RichardsonAbigail Richardson Thursday: Ben Lea Ben LeaBen Lea Friday: Ben Haynes Ben HaynesBen Haynes

We may occasionally pause this rotation if we have a big initiative that needs more attention from one person, or if we need to focus on clearing a backlog of tickets. When you are Support Zero you should continue working on tickets that you're currently assigned to (or escalate/reassign as needed) but shouldn't take on new tickets unless you want to.

Response targets, SLAs, and CSAT surveys

Response Targets

We have a high volume of tickets and we're a small team so we're not able to respond to all issues equally. For this reason we prioritize tickets into three categories. We set a response target for each so that we can be sure that tickets are being handled effectively.

Note that tickets are automatically prioritized in Zendesk and users are updated with information about response targets to set appropriate expectations. In all cases, tickets are routed to the appropriate team and that team is responsible for meeting the response target.

The response targets listed below are our minimums for an initial response, and we often respond far faster. Please note that we do not offer any level of weekend customer support.

High priority

Response target: 12 hours

Tickets are considered high priority if they fulfill ANY of the following conditions:

The customer is high paying
The customer is in a trial stage with the product
The customer is subscribed to the teams add-on
The ticket is listed as critical severity

This ensures that users who pay for support or which are otherwise considered a priority customer are prioritized and get the best possible support experience. Free users can raise critical impact bugs or issues to an appropriate level.

Normal priority

Response target: 24 hours

Tickets are considered normal priority if they fulfill ANY of the following conditions but the user does NOT qualify as a high-paying org:

The customer is subscribed to the Ridiculously cheap plan
The customer is on a PostHog for Startups or Y Combinator plan
The customer is raising a billing issue
The ticket is listed as high severity

This ensures that most paying users get appropriately rapid support and that all billing issues are ensured to get a response. Free users can raise high impact bugs or issues to an appropriate level.

Low priority

Response target: N/A

Tickets are considered low priority if they fulfill none of the conditions for High or Normal priority. This includes tickets raised in the PostHog community, and is mostly users who are on a free plan and who have not entered a card.

We always aim to respond to low priority tickets and will often read and consider them, but we do not set a response target or promise to respond due to the high volume and our need to focus on paying users.

Follow-up / next reply response targets

After our initial response, our follow-up response targets are double those of our initial response targets. For example, if a user replies to our initial response on a high priority ticket (12 hours), our follow-up / next reply response target is within 24 hours.

Escalated ticket response targets

When support engineers need to escalate issues to other engineering teams for deeper investigation, the investigations can take longer. For escalated tickets, our response targets are as follows:

High priority escalated ticket response target: 2 business days
Normal priority escalated ticket response target: 4 business days
Low priority escalated ticket response target: N/A

NOTE: The targets are for a reply to the user. If the escalation turns out to be a bug or feature request, the reported issue doesn't have to be solved by the response target date, we just need to reply to the user. That reply may be to let them know it won't be fixed right away, but that we have opened a bug report or feature request. If we've opened a feature request or a bug report, you can refer the user to the GitHub issue for updates, and Solve the ticket. If you're replying with info that should resolve the issue, leave it in a Pending state (will be auto-solved in 7 days if the user doesn't reply.) If the user replied to confirm the issue is resolved, Solve the ticket. Use On-Hold sparingly, e.g. if you intend to get back to the user soon (more than a week, less than a month.)

CSAT Surveys

As an incentive, we offer to feed one hedgehog for every survey sent. Ben HaynesBen Haynes is the current holder of the hedgehog feeding rights, and takes care of this by making a monthly donation to the Herts Wildlife Trust.

Guidelines for doing support at PostHog

Dealing with difficult or abusive users

We very occasionally receive messages from people who are abusive, or who we suspect may have a mental illness. These can come via the app, or Community Questions. We do not expect support engineers to deal with abuse of any kind, ever.

If this happens, notify Charles CookCharles Cook, Joe Martin or Fraser HopperFraser Hopper. They will either take this on, or advise you on how to reply.

Dealing with legal requests from users

We very rarely receive messages from people wishing to make a legal claim against PostHog, such as cease and desist letters. These can come via the app, or Community Questions. Do not respond to these requests. Instead, notify Charles CookCharles Cook or Fraser HopperFraser Hopper immediately. They will either take this on, or advise you on how to reply.

Users asking for demos, consultations or partnerships

We often receive requests for demos, consultations or other sales-related requests. Most of the time these can be escalated to the Sales team if they arrive via Zendesk. If they arrive directly via email you can forward them to sales@posthog.com.

We also often get requests for partnerships, backlinks, or messages trying to sell us baby Yahama pianos. Sometimes, people want to invest in PostHog. Most of these are obviously spam and can be ignored, but if you think an opportunity may be genuine then you can forward it to Joe MartinJoe Martin so he can take over.

Users asking for their data to be deleted

Most of the time users can self-serve deletion requests and should be encouraged to do so in order to save time and ensure they take responsibility for deleting their own data. Users can delete their environment, project, and organization in the appropriate 'Danger Zone' section of their settings page if they have the correct permissions. Admins can remove members from their organization in the Members page.

If a user refuses to delete their own data, you must first confirm they have the permissions to do this by checking their email address matches that an organization admin. As an extra layer of security, you should also ask them to confirm their address by emailing you directly from it (e.g. not through Zendesk.) Only then should you delete any data on their behalf.

If a user asks for us to delete all of their personal data in compliance with GDPR, you should confirm their identity as described above and delete the user from PostHog. Finally, you should notify Joe MartinJoe Martin so he can delete customer data from our email marketing systems, and Fraser HopperFraser Hopper so he can coordinate further data deletion across our systems.

Community

Support =/= community - we consider them to be separate things.

Tutorials

We want to help teams of all sizes learn how to ask the right product analytics questions to grow their product. To help, we create content in the form of tutorials, blog posts, and videos.

We've also created a bunch of useful templates that cover many of the most popular PostHog use cases.