real-world template to calculate the lifetime value impact of improving first response time by X%

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. Conversational analytics lets you move from guesses to...

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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 sometimes improving — FCR. The outcome is always...

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I want to show you a practical way to cut support costs by about 30% in under a year by combining a simple tiered self-service funnel with lightweight analytics. I’ve done this for teams that range from 10 to 200 agents, and the pattern is the same: fewer repetitive contacts, faster resolution for customers who prefer self-help, and better triage for agents when human intervention is required.Why a tiered self-service funnel worksMost contact...

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Moving a support organisation from an email-first mindset to true omnichannel operations is one of the highest-leverage changes a team can make. I’ve led and advised several migrations like this, and what consistently separates successful programs from stalled projects is a clear, pragmatic sequence of decisions — not aspirational roadmaps. Below is a step-by-step playbook I use with teams: concrete actions, the traps I’ve seen, and the...

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I’ve spent more than a decade helping support teams bridge the messy gaps between product, engineering, and customer-facing teams. One of the clearest levers I’ve seen for getting faster fixes and fewer escalations is a well-designed Service Level Agreement (SLA) framework that’s owned and respected across disciplines. Done poorly, SLAs become finger-pointing tools or a backlog of low-priority tickets chased for the metric rather than the...

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I often get asked by support leaders: “How do I know if our knowledge base is actually helping customers — and how quickly can I spot the biggest wins?” If you’ve got 20 minutes and a cup of coffee, you can run a pragmatic, evidence-based audit that surfaces the highest-impact fixes for deflection. Below I walk you through a repeatable 20-minute process I use with teams to evaluate knowledge base (KB) quality and prioritise improvements...

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When support teams ask me where to start with automation, the conversation quickly moves from flashy AI demos to the boring-but-critical question: which rules actually reduce repetitive work for agents and increase velocity? Over the years I’ve seen teams pour time into automations that sound clever on paper but don’t move the needle on response times, agent load, or customer experience. Here are five practical automation rules I recommend...

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