Insights
The customer support field guide
Analysis, data notes, and how-tos across the whole craft — metrics, quality, people, ops, knowledge, tooling, trust, and AI. Key figures link to their sources; no vendor is paying for the verdict.
44dispatches in the archive20264
- Analysis
Concurrency: the hidden cap on chat quality
The three-times-cheaper math behind live chat lives or dies on one dial nobody watches: how many conversations an agent runs at once. Here is what one, two and three concurrent chats actually cost.
Jul 17, 20263 min - Analysis
Escalation authority: who decides what when risk rises
Design escalation around consequence, decision rights, and accepted ownership—not tiers, urgency labels, or forwarded conversations.
Jul 17, 20263 min - Analysis
After-call work: the invisible queue
The call ends, the customer leaves happy, and the agent is still working — tagging, typing, updating. After-call work is a full component of handle time and the largest pool of support capacity nobody puts on a budget. How much it eats, and how to measure it before you squeeze it.
Jul 15, 20264 min - Analysis
When production breaks, support pays the bill
Engineering gets a war room, an incident commander, and a retro. Support gets a tripled queue and a macro written at 2 a.m. The support incident runbook that fixes the asymmetry.