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.
64dispatches in the archive202617
- Analysis
Fine-Tuning vs Retrieval: Where Your Support Answers Live
Fine-tuning and RAG are pitched as rival ways to make a support bot "know your product." They do different jobs — and for grounding answers in your knowledge, the evidence points one way.
Sep 2, 20263 min - Analysis
Chatbot, Conversational AI, AI Agent: Three Words, Three Different Machines
Vendors use the three terms interchangeably. They describe genuinely different systems — and the difference is exactly what decides what you're buying and what it's allowed to do when no one is watching.
Aug 11, 20264 min - Analysis
Agentic AI in support: what "agents that take actions" actually do
The pitch is an agent that looks things up, issues the refund, and reschedules the delivery on its own. The reality in most support operations is narrower, more supervised, and more honest. Here is the gap, with the numbers.
Aug 7, 20264 min - Analysis
When the Bot Makes Things Up
Support chatbots don't lie on purpose — they fabricate confidently, and a tribunal has already ruled the company owns every word. The real incidents, the liability, and the guardrails that actually contain the damage.