Support

Principles

• Excellent support by engineers is a core value proposition (see what do we sell).
• Support is the way how we get great feedback from customers and the community.
• As ownership is distributed, everyone by definition is involved in support. Everyone is expected to be inbox 0 on support to make this work.
• We have an engineering mindset when it comes to support to build great processes for customers and Langfuse engineers. We do not solve process problems with more people.
• AI (Ask AI) can help answer lots of common questions without needing to read documentation, but customers know best when they want to get an answer from a human. We do not make this decision for them.
• We care about our community and maintain best-effort/no-guarantee community support via public/indexable channels (currently: GitHub Discussions)

Channels

We maintain multiple channels for support depending on the customer segment. We have summarized this here for customers.

How to do support at Langfuse?

How do we communicate?

1. 🐶 Excited, like a Labrador puppy, to discover a new way to improve the product
   The first is great for when you’re talking to someone with feedback or who doesn’t seem frustrated. It’s important because every single support interaction is an opportunity to ship a fix or an improvement. And the excitement is how we show enough interest to properly hear the feedback.
   • Example: “You can’t do that right now, but it sounds super useful. Out of interest what does it unlock for you?”
2. 😷 Clinical and clear
   The second is great for when the issue is tricky or the customer seems frustrated. Sometimes this goes as far as communicating in bullet points instead of paragraphs. When something isn’t working the person might (quite rightly) have low tolerance for a support interaction.
   • Example: “Ah, I see what you mean, that’s not ideal! Sorry. I’ll dig in to that now and let you know what I find by the end of tomorrow.”
   • Example: “thank you for your patience on this topic” instead of “sorry for the slow response”

Source: PostHog Support Hero (we like their support a lot)

How do I prioritize?

We aim to answer all requests within 24 hours, and we try to acknowledge the request asap.

In Plain, we apply priorities as follows automatically:

1. Customers paying for Langfuse, ordered by plan tier and severity
2. GitHub Discussions: feature requests, questions
3. High-intent potential customers (check in #sales if unsure)
4. Self-hosting OSS: We provide reasonable support via GitHub to teams that have a basic understanding of how to self-host

Best practices

Do:

• If answering a question takes more time, please acknowledge quickly, as this makes the customer feel seen with their issue.
• If you feel you “waste” time on some tickets, please add one of the time labels (e.g., time-1h) so we can check and fix bottlenecks here.
• Acknowledge feature requests, bugs, improvements and link them to your Linear issues (see product ops).

Don’t

• Help OSS self-hosters in private chats -> Move them to GitHub discussions
• Don’t ask (paying) users to do work that you can do -> Dig into their problem, create a GH issue/post yourself to track feedback

How do I get fast at support?

At best, we want to answer every general question only once. To achieve this, we aim to update our documentation whenever we identify a potential gap. This allows our AI support bots (inkeep & dosu) to use this information to help other customers.

How do I do this?

• Prioritize GitHub Discussions (especially for non-paid users), as this builds up our public knowledge base
• Fill the gaps in our Documentation & improve in-product UX/docs. Mental model: If 1 person stumbles across it > then 10 also have this issue.
• Add a post to our FAQ section. For frequently asked questions that would convolute our Documentation, we create FAQ posts and link them to each docs section by using tags (observability, prompt-management, evaluation, platform) & link on specific pages
• Use Raycast snippets for common answers (E.g., Acknowledging a message, ‘Great to hear that the issue is solved & let us know if you have any other questions, etc.).
• Use a dictation tool (e.g. SuperWhisper, Betterdictation; put it on the company card), as this speeds up writing responses x2 (for general queries)