Customer Carenumber Co / Best Practices
I’ve been in the thick of incident comms for years — from small SaaS outages to multi-region platform failures — and one lesson keeps coming back: customers will forgive a problem if you communicate clearly, quickly, and honestly. The challenge is doing that in a world where attention is...
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I want to walk you through a practical audit checklist I use when hunting for the one knowledge article that can deliver a meaningful deflection lift—typically in the 8–12% range—for a digital support channel. This is the kind of win that scales: one well-placed, well-written article that...
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When teams roll out GPT-based support assistants, the focus often lands on speed, deflection rates and the wow factor of conversational AI. What’s less sexy but far more critical is building a fail-safe human handover policy that prevents compliance slip-ups. I’ve seen the gap between automated...
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I used to love macros. They promised consistency, speed, and a way to scale support without hiring an army. But over the years I watched the very thing meant to speed conversations quietly erode one of the hardest-earned metrics in support: CSAT. In countless Zendesk instances and similar ticketing...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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