How Planet Labs achieved 99.1% CSAT across +36,000 inquiries with kapa.ai

The Results

• 50,000+ customer inquiries handled per year

• 26% of support cases auto-resolved in under 30 seconds

• 2x faster new hire ramp time

• 99.1% CSAT

• Gold at Stevie Awards for Best Customer Service team

The Situation

Planet Labs operates the world's largest constellation of Earth observation satellites. They scan the entire globe daily and running AI on top to detect change. With 900+ customers across agriculture, government, defense, and intelligence, their user base ranges from expert remote sensing engineers to first-time satellite data users. All of them with questions. All of them filing tickets.

That's where Mike Merit, the Chief Customer Officer at Planet Labs, and his customer support team come in.

The Challenge

Planet's customer base spans a wide technical spectrum. At one end: expert teams with degrees in GIS and remote sensing, fluent in APIs and satellite data pipelines. At the other: a founder in South America trying to estimate next year's corn harvest from satellite imagery with no idea where to start.

"Our team was so preoccupied with answering the basic questions again and again. How do I log into Sentinel Hub? How do I get my API key? And that meant we didn't have time to do the deep dives on the most important customers who really needed our expertise."

Planet had already done the hard work of building a rich self-service content library: a developer center, video training, detailed support articles. The content was excellent. The problem was speed and accessibility.

Compounding this: 15% of all queries arrived in languages other than English. Translating sophisticated geospatial questions required specialist coordination that slowed response times further. New hires took up to six months to reach full productivity, with every question they asked interrupting a colleague's deep work.

The team was stretched. And the roadmap wasn't getting simpler.

The Solution

Merit's response was to step back, define the outcome, then let the team find the solution.

He established three strategic principles: eliminate soul-crushing repetitive tasks, get customers the information they need faster, and gather the data to fuel ongoing improvement. Then he ran an internal contest: find solutions within four months given a budget, and those three parameters as the brief.

The team presented kapa, and Mike saw the potential. Suddenly, all the great content became significantly more accessible to customers. They would be able to get answers instantly.

"It doesn't take an hour to find the stuff. It maybe takes five minutes. But the difference between five minutes and 30 seconds is a big difference. And a customer submitting a ticket and waiting 30 minutes for a response, with our best-in-class response rate of 30 minutes versus getting an answer in 30 seconds?"

Once decided to continue, it only took Planet a few days to deploy kapa.ai in two ways:

1. Externally as a customer-facing widget on their website to answer customer inquiries

2. Internally as a knowledge tool for agents, CSMs, and new hires to query on the spot.

The Impact

The impact showed up quickly, and in unexpected places first.

"We started noticing it early with language. 15% of our queries are in a different language, and it's really hard to translate sophisticated technical questions. Our international team validated that kapa's translations were spot-on. That became one of the first things that drew the broader team in."

New hires were the next signal. One CSM who joined in Japan described using kapa.ai constantly in her first months: it was simply faster than asking over Slack. New hires now reach peer-level productivity in half the time going from 6 months to 3 months.

For Planet, kapa now:

• Handles 50,000+ customer inquiries per year

  • 15% of those not in English yet still validated by international teams as being spot-on

• Auto-resolves 26% of all tickets in less than 30 seconds

• Reduced the need to hire more support FTEs despite a 33% annual revenue growth

• Saves Planet's user roughly 20 minutes of time per day in finding the information they need

For agents and CSMs, having kapa on the team unlocked new opportunities. Freed from high-volume routine work, the team turned its attention to strategic account work, proactive customer success, and embedding support leaders in key account meetings before issues were ever filed. Executive escalations fell to zero. The team saw 99.1% CSAT and ultimately won Gold at the Stevie Awards for Customer Service Department of the Year in 2025.

When asked about what other indicators executives should look for to potentially replicate the success that Planet Labs has had with kapa, Mike offered the following guidance:

"Kapa is a great fit for a nuanced company like ours with a complex portfolio of technical products, a diverse user base, and international employees".

As Mike concludes:

"We use AI to protect our humanity, not replace it. The team is happier because they’re doing the work they were hired to do".