How Debbie scaled support to thousands of conversations a month with one human and Fin

Debbie is a fintech app with an unusual promise: it rewards people for making progress toward their financial goals, turning boring adulting into something fun and motivating. Its users are often midway through saving for a big goal, paying off what they owe, or simply trying to get a better handle on things. Money can be sensitive, so any wrong move can have a serious impact on trust.

For a long time, Debbie’s support ran on Zendesk with no automation at all. Customers submitted requests through a contact form, but nothing was routed or sorted after that – it all piled into one unassigned inbox.

Jessika Raisor joined to take over customer experience, arriving from a career in medical animation, and inherited the whole operation. As volume grew, so did the pressure. At its busiest, it took three people just to keep the inbox moving. But adding people only masked the problem: the volume kept climbing, and even three couldn't get ahead of it.

"Every new day felt like coming back from vacation to an inbox full of emails," says Jessika Raisor, founding CX member at Debbie. "It was getting stressful, and it became clear we didn’t need more people managing the inbox – we needed AI that could actually resolve those requests.”

As the newest member of the team, Jessika made the case to rebuild how Debbie handled support. It was a big ask, and one that needed sign-off from the team. She didn't want a chatbot bolted onto the old system. She wanted a high-performing AI Agent with a helpdesk natively integrated behind it, something a small team could own and run themselves. Trust mattered too. Debbie handles financial data and was wrapping up a SOC 2 security review at the time. Seeing other fintechs Jessika respected already using Fin, an AI Customer Agent, gave her the confidence to move forward.

Fin’s Early Stage Program sealed the case. It’s built to get advanced AI support into startups’ hands from day one – the kind of technology teams usually adopt only once they’re much bigger – giving Debbie the freedom to start strong and grow into it at its own pace. It also removed the financial risk and made Fin an easy yes for the team. With the case made, Debbie moved its helpdesk from Zendesk to Intercom and deployed Fin.

Jessika rebuilt the help center, then embedded Fin inside Debbie's own app so support was always a tap away. From there, she pushed Fin well beyond answering simple questions. Connected to Debbie's systems, it now looks up individual accounts and takes action, automatically awarding rewards points that didn't trigger correctly and verifying a customer's identity before making changes. Jessika also built a multi-step workflow for updating phone numbers, a fiddly, verification-heavy task she used to handle by hand for every customer. Now Fin runs the whole process itself, from confirming identity to making the change, so it never lands in her inbox.

The impact was immediate. "Our CSAT went from averaging 50% to 70% pretty much immediately," Jessika recalls. “Customers started getting instant answers when timing mattered most, and anything that needed a human reached me much faster.”

The biggest change was what it took to keep support running. "Before Fin, our team of three managed around 1,500 conversations a month, and my whole day was spent emailing customers," Jessika shares. "Now it's just me and Fin." Volume has since nearly tripled after a major app relaunch and new partner integrations, but the team hasn't grown with it.

Now Fin is involved in 97% of conversations and resolves 81% of them without Jessika needing to step in. It has resolved more than 18,000 conversations since going live.

That has freed Jessika to focus on the work she never had time for before: improving Debbie's knowledge base, joining weekly product meetings, and building stronger relationships with users instead of spending seven hours a day on emails.

As Debbie heads into its next phase, she wants Fin to take on more of the inbox automatically, from login changes to account balance checks, so more customers get an instant resolution without ever waiting on a human. Her next target is pushing Fin's resolution rate to 85% to 90%.

Her advice to other founders is simple: “Set it up early. I got Fin in before our volume got out of hand, and I honestly can’t imagine handling this inbox without it now. It’s not a chatbot – it’s a team member through and through.”