When teams ask me how to choose a support platform, the first thing I tell them is: don’t judge a vendor on feature checklists alone. The real decision-maker is the total cost of ownership (TCO) — and the only reliable way to estimate that is by running a vendor trial designed specifically to...
Feb 18, 2026
• by Claire Moreau
Latest News from Customer Carenumber Co
When I started helping support teams shift from channel-based organisation to outcome-focused squads, I expected resistance — but what surprised me most was how often teams hadn’t even agreed on the outcomes they were trying to deliver. Channels are easy to see: you can count phone lines, chat sessions, and inboxes. Outcomes are messier because they require judgement, measurement, and...
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Supporting regulated industries — healthcare, finance, telecoms, utilities, and similar — forces you to be precise about escalation workflows. I’ve built and reviewed workflows for teams operating under strict SLAs, audit trails, and privacy constraints, and I still lean on a handful of practical rules whenever I design or evaluate an escalation path. This compact guide walks through what...
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I’ve spent more than a decade helping support teams design processes that keep customers calm and teams focused during incidents. One of the most reliable levers I’ve found is a well-drafted cross-functional incident runbook: a living document that defines who does what, when, and how we talk to customers. Done right, it reduces escalations, shortens resolution times, and — importantly —...
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When I help teams prove the value of self-service content, the most common problem I see is an appetite for perfect measurement that never turns into action. Teams design complex tracking schemas, wait for months of noisy data, then decide measurement is "too hard" and revert to opinion-based decisions.I've learned to flip that script: start with a minimal data collection plan that answers the...
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When I work with product and support teams on onboarding, I stop thinking about "onboarding" as a single linear process and start thinking about a conversation made of signals. Every click, message, error, and delay is a signal that tells you whether a trial user is moving toward activation — or toward churn. Designing an onboarding support journey around these signals is the fastest,...
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I often get asked how to run fast, low-risk experiments that actually tell you whether a new automation or conversational flow is worth rolling out. Recently I needed to compare Intercom’s outbound flow/series approach with our existing live conversation model — and instead of a vague pilot, I designed a one-week experiment that gave clear, actionable results. Below I share the exact approach...
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I run a lot of experiments with chatbots and conversational automation, and one question keeps coming up: how do we prove the bot is actually improving customer satisfaction? It’s tempting to point to a single CSAT score and call it a day, but in practice you need a mix of quantitative and qualitative signals to build a convincing story. Below I share the set of metrics I always track, why each...
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When I’ve been in the room asking for budget for a new support platform, the difference between "we need better tooling" and "we deserve investment" always came down to one thing: the dashboard. Leaders don't buy feelings — they respond to clear, measurable impact. Here’s the exact set of metrics I put on a leadership dashboard to win budget conversations for a new support platform, how I...
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I used to treat reopened tickets as an annoying metric — a little blip on a dashboard that nudged managers to shrug and reassign. Over years of working with support teams, though, I learned that ticket reopenings are a goldmine. They reveal where conversations fail to resolve root causes, where automation promises but underdelivers, and where agents inadvertently create extra work....
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I often get asked whether it's possible to cut average handle time (AHT) without eroding first contact resolution (FCR). In practice, these two metrics are deeply connected: shave off a few minutes in one place and you can accidentally send customers back into the queue. Over the last decade I’ve worked with support teams who needed to reduce AHT to meet cost targets while protecting — and...
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