How I work

Support problems usually get described as people problems or tool problems. Most of the time they're design problems, and the design was never done on purpose in the first place.

Nobody owns the ticket that doesn't fit a category. The process for handling refunds lives in one person's head and that person is on holiday. Reporting got set up once, by someone who has since left, and nobody has touched it since. None of that shows up in a CSAT score, but customers feel all of it.

I've run into the same thing at a three-person team working out of a shared inbox and at Shopify during incidents affecting merchants at scale. The scale changes what it costs you. It doesn't change what's wrong.

What I actually do

I start by finding out what happens, as opposed to what the org chart says happens or what leadership believes happens. That means reading real tickets, sitting with the queue for a while, and asking agents what they do when the process doesn't cover it. That last question is usually where the interesting answers are.

Then I put things in order, because you can't fix everything at once and trying to usually fixes nothing. There's a rough sequence that holds up most of the time. Get the knowledge base honest before you point AI at it. Get people answering consistently before you start scoring them. Work out who owns what before you buy anything new.

Then I build the part you asked for, write down how it works, and hand it over. If a system still needs me in it, I haven't finished the job.

What I bring to it

Ten-odd years inside support and CX teams at Shopify, Hospitable and Fishtank, as an agent, a lead, a manager and an incident responder. Having done the job at every level mostly means I can tell the difference between a process that looks good written down and one people will actually follow at four o'clock on a Friday.

If any of this sounds familiar

Have a look at the free tools, or get in touch and tell me what's going on.