Dapper's Support Workflow & Tooling — From Justin & Mark in the meeting

People & roles#

• Justin Golanowski — formerly in CS at Dapper, now adjacent to product/ops. He doesn't run support day-to-day anymore; he framed the strategic context (cost, headcount, what's being deprecated).
• Mark Kingston — the actual operator. Currently the last general support agent at Dapper. The team has been gutted: Britney left (she "had all the stats down"), Dan Carrero is moving to product (and is internally vibe-coding a Retool replacement), Kenny handles VIPs only. Mark is moving to IT and chips away at the queue on his "off days."

Tooling stack#

Tool	What it's for	Status
Zendesk	Master ticketing system; help center hosting; IT and bug-bounty also flow in	~$54k/yr (Justin found the invoice line on screen)
Fin AI (inside Zendesk)	Top-of-funnel AI bot, identifies as "Dapper AI support agent"; references help center articles + snippets	~$4–30k/yr (they were unsure; Justin saw $4,400 line; Mark thought it was higher); resolution rate 34%, blended 42%
Retool	Account inspection — Mark grabs the user's email from Zendesk, pastes into Retool, sees account state, transactions, KYC	Deprecating (Justin: "I'm pretty sure we're getting rid of Retool"); Dan is building an in-house replacement
n8n	Workflow automation — Mark built account-closure workflow, was building 2FA-reset workflow	Mark's personal investment; uncertain future since they may also leave Fin
Persona	KYC vendor	Active
BigQuery	Data warehouse, queried inside n8n flows for emails and account info	Active
Author	Another workflow tool used in n8n flows	Active
Flow Scan	Blockchain explorer for tracing transactions through Flow chain	Active; tedious for VIP / withdrawal investigations

Ticket volume#

• ~800 unsolved tickets currently in the queue
• 50–100 new tickets/day baseline
• Spikes around pack drops, announcements, and 2FA-reset waves driven by the SEC settlement

Top ticket drivers (in Mark's words)#

1. 2FA resets — biggest single category, mostly driven by the SEC settlement plus people who lost phones; also Disney users who can't go through Fin
2. Disney Pinnacle / Disney IP — Disney's contract bans the chatbot entirely on Pinnacle, so 100% of Disney tickets go to a human
3. Missing-pack / missing-moment claims — Mark used to escalate these to engineering (the moment had a Flow storage issue and needed manual delivery). Now they just reimburse because there's no engineering time
4. Password reset failures — usually because the user signed up with Google or Apple and doesn't realize there's no email password to reset
5. Withdrawal disputes / blockchain transaction tracing — chasing transactions through Flow Scan
6. Account closure — mostly automated by Mark's n8n flow, but edge cases break it

The actual 2FA reset workflow (Mark's "fast" path)#

1. Ticket arrives in Zendesk; user's email is auto-attached to the ticket
2. Mark copies email → pastes into Retool dashboard #1 → pulls up the account
3. Mark cross-references the user's submitted name, phone number, and address with what's in the system
4. If verified → switches to Retool dashboard #2 → enters the auth ID → clicks "Reset MFA"
5. Total: ~1 minute when nothing's weird
6. If anything looks off, Mark goes back and asks for more verification info

Stated pain points#

• Volume × lack of people. The math is broken — Mark is alone, Dan is moving to product, Britney left.
• Fin's perception problem. Fin frequently answers correctly, but users ignore it and demand a human ("Just give me an agent"). Even when Mark tells them the same thing Fin already said, they accept it.
• Edge-case detection. Mark's n8n workflows pick up the median ticket but miss subtleties (e.g., a user with multiple lookalike transactions, a Flow-storage failure that needs eng escalation).
• PII concerns. Mark started building the 2FA flow in n8n but doesn't want to send PII through Claude / OpenAI because of where the data ends up.
• VIP investigations — tracing transactions through Flow Scan can "take days."
• Two-tab workflow. Even at 1-minute-per-ticket, having to bounce between two Retool dashboards adds up at scale.

Strategic context Justin signaled#

• Dapper aspirationally wants to leave Zendesk but the ticket-history lock-in is the blocker. ("That's a rumor.")
• Dan Carrero is internally building a Retool replacement — "vibe-coding the front end but with database access," and creating multiple custom dashboards.
• They may also be leaving Fin (Justin heard from Dan), which means Mark's 2FA n8n workflow is on hold.
• Lots of tooling change happening simultaneously — Justin acknowledged "we'll cross that bridge for sure" but recognized the need to "take a beat, tackle one at a time."

Their reaction to the AZ tool#

• Justin: "f***** love that UI"*, "see light at the end of the tunnel", said it was the kind of thing Dapper could use.
• Mark: "I really like what you guys have built" — specifically singled out the in-tool copilot, predicted-next-action, and skills-from-past-tickets ideas.
• Both flagged that the next conversation should loop in Dan (mainly) and Kenny.
• Justin floated commercial collaboration: "could work together some way to like even maybe if it's just like guiding us how you started kind of building that out and then we can take it and customize it to the Dapper side of things."

The one thing to hear loudest from Mark#

Even with all his automation, the marginal ticket — the one that takes 45 minutes — is where the regulatory exposure, IP-licensor risk, and customer-trust damage lives, and it's the ticket that no automation handles. He's still the last line on those, and he doesn't trust an AI to take over them. That is where the AZ tool's HITL design lands well with him.