Instant Premium User Identification in Support

The friction

I was running support solo for HelloBible - 100% of incoming tickets crossed my desk. The problem: I couldn’t tell at a glance whether a ticket came from a free user or a premium subscriber (someone who actually pays us). That meant a premium user with an urgent issue could wait the same amount of time as a free user with a question I could answer with a macro.

This violated the most basic rule of support: serve your paying customers first.

The expected fix is “use the official Zendesk + RevenueCat connector.” Except - and I confirmed this with both teams’ docs - there is no native connector that exposes subscription status on the ticket view. The official integrations stop at “user has account,” not “user has paid.”

My approach

I needed to enrich every incoming ticket with subscription data before it landed in my queue. I had two requirements:

1. Real-time (or near-real-time) - I shouldn’t have to look up the user manually
2. Reliable - false negatives mean a premium user gets deprioritized; not acceptable

I built the flow in n8n:

1. New Zendesk ticket triggers a webhook
2. n8n queries the RevenueCat API with the user’s email
3. RevenueCat returns subscription status, plan, and renewal date
4. n8n writes this back to the Zendesk ticket as a custom field, visible at the top of the ticket view
5. If the user is premium, an internal note auto-flags it: ”🟢 PREMIUM - respond first”

I paired this with 80% macro coverage for the most common ticket types (which I identified by tagging 200 historical tickets and clustering). So now: premium users get flagged automatically, common issues get resolved with one click.

The result

3,200+ tickets resolved through this system. Average first-response time on premium tickets dropped meaningfully (I’m holding back the exact number for the interview). And critically: I’m no longer the single point of failure for support - the macros and the auto-flagging mean any future hire can pick up where I left off, immediately.

The lesson

The official connectors were inadequate. The “right” fix would have been to lobby for a feature request from Zendesk or RevenueCat - which would take 6 months and might never ship. Instead, I built the integration myself with n8n in two evenings.

This is the bias I bring to operations: ship the thing today, even if it’s duct tape, because duct tape that works beats elegant solutions that don’t exist yet.