Duck Tales: The team and process behind DuckDuckGo’s customer support (Ep.46)

30 Sep 2026 · 18 min

Episode Duck Tales: The team and process behind DuckDuckGo’s customer support (Ep.46)

0:00 17:42

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and John (Support) discuss our customer support process, why we read all tickets (good or bad), and how we actually use them to improve all aspects of the user experience.

If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com.

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Beah: Hello, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. Today you’re gonna hear about how we do support at DuckDuckGo, and my guest is John. John, do you wanna introduce yourself briefly?

John: Yeah, for sure. Yep, I’m John. I work within our marketing and communications team. And for the past few years, my main goal has been managing and improving how our support operates for the DuckDuckGo subscription and beyond.

Beah: Sweet. So if you’ve used DuckDuckGo support, perhaps you’ve gotten a message from John or one of the other teammates who we’ll learn more about in this call or in this pod. So I’m Beah. If you haven’t met me, I’m on the product team at DuckDuckGo. All right, let’s jump in. I’m gonna ask John some questions and we’ll go from there. So tell me John, just to kind of set the scene, what sort of things do we provide customer support for?

John: A lot. The bulk of the support that we offer is through the DuckDuckGo subscription. So for us who handle support, it means handling things like billing questions, assisting with activation across multiple devices, questions about the plans that we offer, and more technical troubleshooting related things. The subscription can be bought a few different ways, each with its own different path to activation. So a good bit of the support that we offer is helping our users navigate these paths to get more comfortable with our subscription and its features. So some of our great front-end team members built a support form where most of our tickets run through. It was built to be kind of as self-service as possible, but a category is picked and depending on what the selection is, a potential solution gets surfaced. This way, plenty of users can get an answer without really needing to submit anything or wait for us to respond to them. But basically, our help pages kind of sit behind this and there’s links to that support form on every one of our subscription help pages. It’s the first stop for most of these tickets. We’ve been piloting an AI agent on a few help pages and I’m sure we’ll get into that as well.

Beah: So like if we don’t, if we can answer, if we can get people an article right then and there that answers their questions, that’s the best case scenario for everybody because they get an immediate answer, but if not, then we have a process to kind of hand it off to a human or an in-between, which is like AI assisted answers.

John: Exactly. That’s right.

Beah: And maybe I should say like before we had the subscription, which is the first paid product that DuckDuckGo offered, and the only one we offer, we didn’t really have a support team or support process. I mean, we had emails for different things, but like effectively we didn’t have to worry about customer support. And it was the introduction of the paid subscription that sort of like brought this problem to our doorstep and to you. Is that fair to say? Yeah, yeah.

John: Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect.

Beah: Okay, cool. So tell me a little bit more about like how this all works like team-wise, who’s working on this, how have we structured that?

John: Absolutely. We have a small but mighty team. So when that subscription first launched, there were a few of us…

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