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1. Prioritize Communication: Luka maintains that even in a fully international, remote team, consistent and structured communication systems (like Slack channels and weekly meetings) can successfully replace real-time collaboration and ensure continuous alignment and support coverage.
2. Optimize AI in CX: At AppSumo, combining AI tools with existing systems automated first-draft responses for support inquiries, reducing time spent on basic tickets by 80%. Luka believes this allows his team to focus on high-value, complex customer needs.
3. AI vs. Human Agents: Luka believes that effective CX leadership isn’t about replacing humans with AI – it’s about strategically using automation to handle repetitive work so human agents can concentrate on higher-level, impactful customer interactions.
4. Value Human Oversight: While automation enhances efficiency, Luka believes that human oversight remains essential in CX. AI drafts responses, but final review and quality control always rely on a knowledgeable team member.
5. Proactive Downtime in CX: Luka encourages his team to use downtime proactively, reviewing and optimizing AI systems while extending customer support beyond traditional channels, actively managing reviews, content, and social engagement to enhance the overall customer experience.
AppSumo is a rapidly growing digital marketplace. As the company scales, Customer Experience Manager Luka Belik and his three-member team have served over 800,000 customers worldwide. Be inspired by how Luka’s approach to CX – blending AI with human oversight – streamlines routine tickets, allowing his team to focus on meaningful customer interactions.
Meet Luka Belik, Customer Experience Manager at AppSumo!
Founded in 2010 by Noah Kagan, AppSumo is a digital marketplace that offers software tools for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small businesses.
Working in customer support since 2017, Luka Belik joined AppSumo Originals, a sister company of AppSumo.com, as Customer Experience Manager in 2021. “AppSumo Originals was created because AppSumo needed specific tools for its own operations,” Luka explains. With a lean team of nine, the company develops internal tools that are now used by more than 800,000 people worldwide.
The customer experience team includes Luka in Croatia and three members based in the United States, the Philippines, and Europe, all of whom have worked together since the beginning. This international, remote structure enables seamless 24/7 support while everyone maintains a standard daytime schedule – no graveyard shifts required. Luka credits familiarity and trust for his team’s efficiency. “The three of us are able to support 800,000 users. Just a few years ago, we needed ten to eleven people to do the job.”
A fully international, remote team structure means that agents are never online at the same time working together. “Coordinating my team members was a challenge in the beginning,” Luka admits. The solution: setting up a Slack channel to discuss customer service-related issues along with product tools. Also, regular team meetings are held to recap the past week and get ready for the next. “While we are never online simultaneously, we are communicating 24/7,” Lukas notes.
With a fully international, remote team, agents are rarely online at the same time. “Coordinating my team members was a challenge in the beginning,” Luka admits. His solution was to establish a dedicated Slack channel for customer service discussions and product updates, along with holding regular team meetings to review the previous week and prepare for the next. “Even though we’re not online simultaneously, we’re communicating 24/7,” Luka notes.
To optimize its customer service tech stack, the team uses Help Scout alongside a custom app built by Luka and insights from previously resolved Help Center tickets. Explaining the workflow, Luka shares, “Once a ticket runs through those three systems, a response is drafted for us to review. We make any necessary edits and send it out.” He estimates this process has reduced the time spent on basic tickets by 80 percent. “Now we can dedicate more time to high-value customers and those who need more in-depth guidance.”
The AI customer support platform Chatbase, accessible across AppSumo, has also proven invaluable. The chatbot is trained weekly and handles approximately 1,000 conversations and up to 5,000 messages during that time. Reflecting on the team’s evolution, Luka shares, “As team members left to pursue other opportunities, we realized we could continue scaling our processes by incorporating AI and building our own tools into customer service.”
Despite the automation, human expertise remains central. “We are all experts in our tools,” he emphasizes. “There’s always a human reviewing the AI’s work before it goes out.”
AI has transformed the way escalations are managed. “Previously, we had to manually verify each issue and escalate every bug to the desk,” Luka explains. Now, using Claude Code, he can identify the problem, fix the code, test it locally, and submit a pull request on GitHub for developer review. As a result, bug resolution times have dropped dramatically, from two to three days to just two to three hours.
The team uses any downtime to conduct regular spot checks, ensuring their AI tools and knowledge base remain accurate, up to date, and fully operational. Beyond managing the chatbot and Help Center, they also respond to questions on AppSumo’s product pages and engage with customer feedback on Trustpilot and Product Hunt. “We also create tutorial videos for our YouTube channel, and I manage the social media pages for all of our tools,” Luka adds.
With AI advancing at a rapid pace, Luka acknowledges that the customer service landscape over the next five to ten years is difficult to predict. What he does foresee is his team continuing to leverage AI to drive greater efficiency. “In the next year, I expect my team members to guide AI toward faster issue resolution,” he says. “I want them working more closely with developers and the product, so everything is interconnected and operating at top speed.”
Incorporating AI into the customer experience remains a topic of debate. For leaders striving to strike the right balance, Luka believes, “the challenge isn’t actually choosing between humans and automation. It’s designing systems where automation removes the noise so agents can focus on problems that require real thinking.”
Key hiring trait? Ownership. The ability to take responsibility for the outcome and not just blindly reply. Everything else can be learned. Ownership is very important – when you take a project on, own it until the end. That’s the same thing with the customers. If you are helping someone, don’t just send them a draft and be done. Get into the problem, see how they are seeing the issue from their end, and carry it out until you find a resolution.
Favorite communication channel for support? Internally, Slack. For external support, email – It’s been working for us well for the last 10 years.
Recent book or podcast? I recently read Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Bill Carr and Colin Bryar. The book stood out to me; it treats customer experience as a design system problem, not a support problem. Instead of asking how support should handle issues better, it asks why those issues exist at all by focusing on what processes, incentives, or product decisions upstream are creating them. That shift is essential if you want to scale CX without burning our teams and disregarding trust. It gets to the bottom of the issue and asks, ‘why are customers actually reaching out to us with this question?” The book changed how we do work and support, because it’s mainly a design problem. That’s why I want to add as many processes as possible to improve our tools so we have less tickets.
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