Momentum Episode 30:
How Jotform Uses Its Own AI Agents to Enhance Customer Support

At Jot Form, we use our own product whenever possible, including forms, tables, apps, workflows, e-signatures, and more, but this has never been more prominent than with our recent launch of Jot Form AI agents, which we deployed extensively to help enhance our own customer service.

So, what do we learn from eating our own proverbial dog food? To find out, today we're talking with Jot Form's VP of customer experience, Taylor Grindle.

Welcome to Momentum, a podcast by Jot Form where we talk about the technology, productivity tips, insights, and best practices that help us move forward in business and in life. Let's get started.

Taylor, it's great to have you on the show. How are you?

I'm doing well. Hope the same for you too.

Awesome. I am super excited to talk to you today about Jot Form's customer support, our experience with Jot Form AI agents, and dive into all of that. Do you want to give a quick background on yourself, your history at Jot Form, and then pivot a little bit more into what customer support at Jot Form looks like?

Yeah, definitely. My name is Taylor. I'm the VP of customer experience for Jot Form. I've been a Jotformer for almost exactly four years now, with April being my four-year anniversary. I've actually been using Jot Form for about five or six years prior to that at some of my previous positions, so I came in knowing a little bit about Jot Form already and how the product worked.

At Jot Form, support is super important. It's one of the first things we actually think about. Our organization is quite large regarding the number of supporters we have and the number of countries they're in across the world, and it's something we take very seriously. Whenever we release a new product or do a new initiative, it's always support first before anything else at Jot Form.

For a company of our size, can you talk a little bit about the scope of our customer support network, like how many team members we have and how that whole process works and scales?

Yeah, definitely. Our organization operates out of 19 different countries across the world, so we have supporters all over the place and in all different time zones. We make sure to have agents located wherever we have customers. We also have a large number of team members across various teams, and our entire support department is around 250 or more at this point. We're actually a large chunk of the organization, and support being at the forefront of Jot Form is something we invest a lot into.

Would you say that level of support is normal for a SaaS B2B company in our space?

I think any company is always looking to provide the best support they can, but sometimes they see it as something they have to do when releasing or supporting a product. For Jot Form, support is really at the front. We want to make sure our users completely understand how to use the product and are willing to help them with literally anything, including the hundreds of integrations we have. That's why we have such a large and diverse team with expertise in backend infrastructure, front-end infrastructure, and every single integration we offer. It's a lot to manage, but that's the type of investment you have to make for a platform with a scope as large as ours.

How would you characterize more broadly the mission or vision for customer support and where it places in an organization and in rank of priority?

Jot Form absolutely makes support the priority. Our department gets whatever it needs—tools, software, resources. Jot Form sees support as a big investment and how we get our customers plugged into the product. We constantly analyze data reports, response times, quality, and CSAT scores, both internal and external. We invest a lot in these areas to create a really strong support department. Our position is to help customers with anything, whether being a therapist, tech guru, or integrations expert. As long as it's on the platform, we're here to help customers build out their forms, processes, and workflows effectively. We always recommend reaching out even when there isn't a problem, as many of our agents have extensive knowledge of the platform. If you're looking to optimize or solve a problem, you should definitely come to us first. We process a large number of tickets and are always willing to help no matter what.

You say you process a large number of tickets. Can you give some insight into the volume we normally process?

We don't always look at the number of tickets daily because we're in the trenches assisting customers, but this was a great opportunity to analyze our yearly impact. On average, we process around 40 to 45,000 tickets monthly, with every ticket receiving a response. No ticket gets skipped or ignored. At the end of the year, that usually totals over half a million tickets, sometimes closer to 600 or 700,000 depending on the year. It's a big impact.

What would you say is the key metric of success for customer support for your team?

The key metric is feedback—from customers and internally from other teams. We place big emphasis on this and have processes in place. Sometimes developers suggest better ways to improve based on what they see. We take all feedback seriously, including thousands of CSAT scores every month, all reviewed by humans. We look at every review, including social media and legacy emails or phone calls. We take all feedback seriously and do what we can to make things right if there's a problem.

Support is the connecting point with the customer, especially for a self-served product like Jot Form. While enterprise accounts have dedicated reps, the primary user base is self-served, and support is the frontline with direct communication when users need help or want to optimize something. This is critical and important.

Let's get into the nuts and bolts of how it works. With a large organization and user base, what happens when someone sends a support request or ticket? What's the process from there?

Enterprise is very important to us, especially with customer relationships. There are process differences between managing incoming tickets on B2B and enterprise. B2B is our self-served product, Jotform.com. Whenever we receive a ticket or request via website, email, or social media, it gets ingested through our public help center where people can search for answers or see how others solved complex workflows. Tickets get triaged immediately by team members looking for priority and where the ticket should go—whether escalated to developers, product experts, or other teams like workflow or AI agents. Every customer's ticket or request is acknowledged and responded to as soon as possible, usually within 30 minutes to an hour depending on the day and volume. We consider that phenomenal given the scale and number of tickets.

Above response time, quality of response is the highest priority. We tell all supporters, especially new ones, to provide quality responses by understanding the question and problem fully, solving the issue on first response, anticipating next questions, and following up with user guides. We have thousands of user guides that are continuously updated and growing. After triage, agents often collaborate internally, especially for new or complex issues, turning them into group challenges that supporters appreciate given the platform's size and scope. We can usually figure out even seemingly impossible workflows, which is why we encourage reaching out even for workflow improvements. Responses come within 30 minutes to an hour, ensuring customers feel heard, acknowledged, and hopefully fully solved. Follow-up is available if needed.

With the advent of AI, it's very important that as we use these tools, we stick to what we do best in customer support. This is a good pivot to AI agents, which we released in February as a customer support-focused product. Given our organizational emphasis on support, AI agents have significantly impacted our internal processes. Can you give a quick refresher on what Jot Form AI agents are, how they help with customer service, and your department's approach to adopting them and their impact?

Jot Form is a platform and concept that we tell customers to think of as their central point of data collection. This could be anything from HR forms to credit card forms or family gatherings. Jot Form should be at the forefront of data collection, and from there, information goes where it needs. Our AI agents automate this entire process, allowing more dynamic conversations with customers or form fillers, increasing engagement. From a support standpoint, AI agents can add knowledge bases, scrape websites for information, and perform API actions, which is my favorite feature. For example, our AI agent can open tickets on behalf of customers through API usage. It looks at continuously updated user guides to provide up-to-date information. AI agents automate customer experience and data intake, giving customers someone to interact with rather than filling out static forms.

It's much more engaging talking to an AI agent, which has personality and can converse across various channels. They can trigger actions as well. When did you start integrating AI agents into our customer support? Did you beta test before launch or implement immediately? What was the adoption process?

AI agents were internally developed as a fun project for the team to sink their teeth into and use internally. As excitement grew, we realized there was a product here, and support was the first direction we thought of for usage. We beta tested the product behind the scenes with a few thousand customers for a couple of months before the official release. The same day we released AI agents publicly, we also released our AI agent to all customers, making it a double stressful day. We took a lot of customer feedback, reviewed AI conversations, found problems, and solutions to ensure the product was ready for any size organization. Processing 45,000 tickets a month is unique, so we needed to make sure the AI could handle whatever came its way.

Development has been exciting as customers use AI agents more on the product and support sides. Support helps guide product direction, and we constantly develop new features based on feedback and our own usage. Conversations have been interesting, and support is part of product development, which is cool given the data points and customer interaction with AI agents.

Support is the common thread between customers and product development, which is critical. Addressing concerns about AI agents taking jobs, that's not the case here. AI agents augment our customer support staff, facilitating interactions and helping things run smoothly.

At Jot Form, we truly believe in helping customers at all levels, whether free users or enterprise customers. Everyone gets the same support standard. AI agents help with quick answers to common questions, like changing a form's background color, freeing human staff to handle more complex workflows. Customers always have the option to talk to a real person. AI agents provide immediate answers for simple questions, while human supporters handle complex issues and workflows.

Soon, we'll release the ability for AI agents to take over conversations on customer requests across ticketing, help center, and live chat. Customers can always reach out 24/7 and request human interaction. Maintaining human interaction is a priority at Jot Form.

With a sprawling platform and many products, what was the process of training an AI agent to master Jot Form? It seems daunting given the many products, tools, and integrations.

Our support teams, between 30 and 50 people daily, review AI conversations as their whole job. We're committed to this because our supporters know the platform best. We translate our organizational knowledge into the AI agent through training methods. The biggest and simplest is loading thousands of user guides into the AI agent. This process identified user guides needing updates or edits we weren't aware of, giving us an opportunity to build a more robust user guide section. We continuously review conversations and improve AI agents, currently handling thousands of conversations daily with multiple questions each. We aim to review as many as possible to ensure tone and alignment with our best practices, making customers feel heard and not frustrated. Our team has become more skilled at using AI and agent tools, which are the same tools customers have access to. Every day we make large progress, and the number of AI conversations grows.

This is where the proverbial 'eat your own dog food' comes in. We use our own product robustly across forms, tables, apps, workflows, and AI agents, which are everywhere in our organization, enhancing and facilitating smoother operations. This is the use case we want our customers to have, and we live and breathe it ourselves.

Any specific learnings since launching Jot Form AI agents a couple of months ago?

We've learned a lot about managing our processes and support, identifying gaps like user guides needing updates. As Jot Form moves fast, we ensure guides go live the same day as products or earlier. This was a big launch, and customer feedback was critical to development. Features like API actions are exciting, especially for enterprise customers.

API actions allow making API calls based on AI conversations. For example, escalating a chat to a ticket in our help center. Customers experience a smooth process without seeing backend infrastructure. Healthcare customers use this to pull appointment info from chats, avoiding phone calls or embarrassment. This functionality lets you intake information, converse, and take action, integrating with all our platform's tools. We definitely eat our own dog food with this product.

Other features worth highlighting include integrations, especially Slack, which we use internally for communication. AI agents send messages to channels for actions or reviews. Integrations like Slack work well within our ecosystem, and AI agents were implemented thoughtfully based on customer feedback over the years. Customers have told us AI agents are great and want to see what more we can add. We reviewed 10 years of tickets to identify needs and added features accordingly. Customers want more time to see how AI agents work because much functionality is already where it needs to be, which is exciting from product and support perspectives.

Our launch philosophy was to be thoughtful, not rushing to be first to market. We took time with beta testing and users to ensure readiness, which has paid dividends in reception.

Can you quantify roughly how much time Jot Form AI agents have saved us so far?

It's hard to say now. We're continuously analyzing data with mixed results, which is normal. We need a long-term perspective to see impact. Some days show many AI conversations and ticket reductions; others show increases but with more complex ticket content. The impact is allowing us to support customers via their preferred channels—phone, AI agent, text, chat, or legacy tickets. We're available wherever customers want to engage. AI agents aren't about saving immense time but about engaging customers on their terms, scaling from free users to enterprise with sophisticated workflows and CSM calls. AI is just another channel to engage customers.

This approach meets customers where they are with many engagement options. Where do you see the future of AI agents and Jot Form progressing?

From support's perspective, AI is an assistive tool to make us more effective as a team, not to replace team members. We're also exploring AI to solve internal supporter questions, especially for new team members needing quick answers. We're looking at AI from all angles as an augment to our support team. Our supporters are spread globally, and AI is our plus one team member. As the platform grows and tools improve, everything will get better. The integration between AI and human teams will strengthen over time, which is very exciting and just the beginning of the journey.

Is there anything else relevant to mention?

We're committed to giving every customer the same support standard, whether free, gold plan, or enterprise. If you want to try us out and have questions, don't worry about wasting our time. Feel free to ask questions, submit tickets, use the help center, check user guides, and provide feedback. We have comment sections on every guide and appreciate feedback, especially about AI agents. If you find gaps or issues, let us know. We're here to help with anything, from CSS on a form to complex workflows or workarounds. Our team is proud and committed to providing the best customer support possible, working day and night to keep customers happy. Organizationally, we're deeply committed to this level of support for all customers.

Well, everyone, you heard it straight from the source. This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you again, Taylor, for coming on. For anyone listening, try out Jot Form AI agents yourself by going to jotform.com/AIagents to try one for free today, or reach out to Jot Form support. They are here to help and ensure your needs are met. It's going to be an exciting journey with new features coming soon, so stay tuned.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.