Supporting customers in multiple languages is not a translation problem. It's an operations problem. The naive version, translate your help articles and bolt machine translation onto the live chat, looks complete and breaks in ways that stay invisible right up until a frustrated customer is…
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Most support metrics measure speed and cost: response time, average handle time, tickets closed per hour, SLA hit-rate, cost per contact. They're popular because they're easy to count and they roll up into tidy dashboards. The problem is that they reward the wrong behaviour. They…
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A complaint, handled well, can leave a customer more loyal than if nothing had gone wrong at all. That's the most counterintuitive and most useful fact in customer service: the moment something breaks is the moment you have the customer's full attention and your biggest…
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Self-service should handle the questions that don't need a human, so that humans are free for the ones that do. That's the whole rule, and almost every mistake in this area comes from breaking it in one of two directions: putting a human on work…
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Most companies treat customer support as a cost centre to be minimised: deflect the tickets, cut the handle time, shrink the team, get the cost-per-contact down. That framing is the central mistake in how businesses think about support. Support is a retention channel. It's where…
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