Best Practices

I run quarterly CX retrospectives because monthly fire-fighting and weekly stand-ups rarely create the space to learn deliberately. Over the years I’ve seen retros devolve into complaint sessions — a room where every pain point is aired but nothing changes. In this post I’ll share a reproducible template I use at Customer Carenumber Co (https://www.customer-carenumber.co.uk) to run a quarterly retrospective that consistently surfaces...

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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 to consider, the trade-offs to balance, and a...

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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 — preserves trust by keeping customers informed with...

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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’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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