How Vercel cut support volume 65% by connecting AI agents to Plain

The challenge

Vercel’s technical field team handles pre-sales, post-sales, and technical support. That team spends 95% of its time with customers, helping them set up their architecture and migrate onto Vercel. What customers tell that team is how bugs, documentation gaps, and product feedback get back to the product team.

Vercel’s old ticketing tool had no integration layer and no custom workflows. Customer information stayed in tickets and didn’t reach the teams that could act on it.

Why Vercel chose Plain

Vercel builds software for a living, so building its own support stack was an option. David’s team decided against it, because they wanted a vendor that already knew how support should run and would still let them build on top of it.

Plain stood out because it focuses on support work instead of trying to cover every customer-facing function. Plain’s AI handles support work out of the box, and Plain’s workflows and API let Vercel connect it to its own systems.

The move took about two weeks, from switching on new tickets in Plain to migrating the old ones.

Building their own agent on Plain

Vercel built an agent on top of Plain called the Case Retro Agent. It reads every ticket, Slack message, email, and phone transcript Vercel has with customers, and groups them into patterns. It then tells the team what to update in Vercel’s product documentation and in the customer-facing AI agent.

Plain didn’t build the Case Retro Agent. Vercel did, using Plain’s API and support for bring-your-own agents. That’s the point: Plain handles collecting, triaging, and routing support work, so Vercel’s engineers can spend their time building what’s specific to Vercel.

Results

David’s team measured the change from before Plain to now.

• 38% more tickets per engineer. Each technical support engineer closes 38% more tickets in a given week.

• 79% lower first response time. The drop holds across customer segments, licensing agreements, and workloads.

• About 50% lower customer wait time. The time from when a customer opens a ticket to when it’s resolved is down by close to half.

• 65% of ticket volume saved by the Case Retro Agent.

Support data that reaches the rest of Vercel

Plain now feeds more than support at Vercel. Customer conversations in Plain go into Vercel’s engineering, product, and design roadmaps, its accounts receivable and payable process, and its trust and safety and security questionnaire work.

That matters because David ties support to revenue. Vercel measured that customers who engage with support grow their consumption of Vercel twice as fast as customers who don’t.

Looking ahead

Vercel started on Plain with its technical support team and is now connecting it to more of the business.