Reference
Templates & checklists
The tools you’d otherwise rebuild from scratch — QA rubrics, career ladders, onboarding plans, SLA starters, escalation matrices, and readiness checklists. Copy them, adapt them, ship them. No sign-up, no vendor pitch.
Templates
30-day support onboarding plan
A week-by-week ramp plan that takes a new support rep from product basics to a full live queue in 30 days, with concrete goals and a competency check to pass before each stage.
Open QA & QualityQA calibration session agenda
A 60-minute agenda for a recurring QA calibration session where reviewers blind-score the same tickets, surface disagreement, and resolve to a shared standard; use it to keep your QA scores consistent across reviewers.
Open People & CareersCoaching 1:1 template
A weekly 30-minute coaching agenda for a team lead and a rep — one strength, one growth area, and a rep-led half — designed to build skill, not interrogate performance.
Open Metrics & MeasurementCSAT & survey question bank
A copy-paste bank of CSAT, CES, optional NPS and free-text follow-up questions with the wording, timing and scale traps flagged — use it when building or auditing a post-support survey.
Open Support OpsEscalation matrix
A ready-to-fill escalation matrix that maps issue types and severities to a named owner, target response time, and the exact next tier or specialist — use it when your queue keeps stalling on tickets nobody clearly owns.
Open Support OpsIncident & status-page comms pack
Copy-paste status-page and customer update templates for every stage of an outage — acknowledgement through post-incident follow-up — so your team can post clear, calm updates while the incident is still hot.
Open Knowledge & Self-ServiceMacro & saved-reply starter set
A ready-to-adapt set of 12 saved replies for the moments that repeat in every queue — greetings, asking for more detail, known issues, refunds, escalations, follow-ups, and closings — written to sound like a person, not a script.
Open QA & QualityQA scorecard & rubric
A weighted, 8-criterion rubric for scoring individual support conversations on a 0–100 scale, with an auto-fail gate — use it to make QA consistent and outcome-focused rather than a checkbox exercise.
Open Support OpsSLA policy starter
A fill-in-the-blanks SLA policy — first-response, resolution and update targets by priority and channel, business-hours rules, and clock-pause guardrails — for teams setting or rewriting their service-level commitments.
Open People & CareersSupport career ladder (IC + lead tracks)
A two-track support career ladder — individual contributor and lead/management — that spells out scope, expected skills, autonomy, and example responsibilities at every level, so reps and managers can agree on where someone stands and what closes the gap to the next level.
Open Metrics & MeasurementSupport QBR deck outline
A slide-by-slide outline for a support quarterly business review — volume, quality, team health, cost, wins, risks and the ask — built to defend the org's value and pair every efficiency number with its quality guardrail.
Open Tooling & StackSupport vendor evaluation scorecard
A weighted 1-5 scorecard for comparing support platforms on the criteria that actually predict a good year — fit, usability, integrations, reporting, support, security, pricing/TCO, and roadmap — with demo questions and red flags.
Open Tooling & StackAI support vendor RFP template
A request-for-proposal template you send to AI support vendors that forces their resolution, data, pricing, and accountability claims into writing before any demo — so you compare answers on paper instead of buying the best pitch.
Open Support OpsSupport capacity planning worksheet
A fill-in worksheet that turns a volume forecast into a defensible headcount number — how many reps you need to clear the work at the service level you promised, and how far that is from what you have — for planning a hiring case or a quarter's staffing.
Open Metrics & MeasurementCSAT driver-analysis worksheet
A spreadsheet-grade worksheet for turning a folder of CSAT survey responses into a ranked list of the operational drivers that actually move your score — use it when you know your CSAT number but not what to fix.
Open CX & TrustDetractor follow-up playbook
A step-by-step playbook for closing the loop after a customer gives you a low score — triage, a fast first touch, a diagnosis-and-fix conversation, sourced compensation guidance, and a logging loop — for turning "burned" back into "fine" instead of hunting for a superfan.
Open Knowledge & Self-ServiceKnowledge base style guide
The single writing standard every help-center article is held to — voice, titling, structure, article types, terminology, screenshots, and a pre-publish gate — so a week-two hire's article reads like your best writer's; adopt it when your KB is inconsistent, hard to scan, or growing fast enough that quality is drifting.
Open People & CareersNew support-manager 30-60-90 plan
A 90-day plan for someone stepping into a support-manager role — whether promoted from within or hired in — structured as Listen (days 1-30), Diagnose (31-60), and Act (61-90), with an exit gate at each stage; use it so your first quarter builds a real map before it changes anything.
Open People & CareersSupport rep performance review template
A structured quarterly or half-yearly performance review for a support rep — evidence gathering, a support-specific competency rubric, metrics read as context rather than verdict, and forward goals — for managers who want a review that holds up instead of one that runs on last month's memory.
Open Support OpsSupport shift-schedule starter
A fill-in template that turns your demand curve into a defensible weekly support shift schedule — sizing coverage by interval, converting it to headcount with occupancy and shrinkage, and rotating nights and weekends fairly.
Open Support OpsTicket tagging taxonomy starter
A ready-to-adapt ticket tagging scheme built on separate fields for contact reason, root cause, and resolution, plus the naming, governance, and quarterly-maintenance rules that stop tag sprawl, for teams whose ticket data is too messy to report on.
Open CX & TrustVoice-of-Customer program plan
A one-page plan for standing up a Voice-of-Customer program that actually drives decisions — roles, the listen/interpret/act/close-the-loop cycle, metrics, governance cadence, and a 90-day rollout — for when you're launching a VoC effort or resuscitating one that collects feedback nobody acts on.
Open People & CareersSupport rep career development plan (IDP)
A one-page individual development plan (IDP) a support rep co-owns with their manager — where they are now, one direction they're growing toward, and two or three goals broken into real work, coaching, and study, each with a target date and a check-in cadence.
Open AI in SupportChatbot conversation-design template
A per-intent design template for a support chatbot flow — frame the intent, script the happy path, write fall-forward fallbacks, wire the human offramp, and pass a pre-launch review — so you ship one flow that actually resolves instead of a bot that traps people in a doom loop.
Open CX & TrustCustomer journey map worksheet
A one-page worksheet for mapping a single persona through one journey — stage by stage goals, actions, emotions, and the support signals each stage generates — so you can find where friction turns into tickets and lost customers.
Open Knowledge & Self-ServiceKnowledge-base article template
A fill-in skeleton for a single help-center article — title, prerequisites, numbered steps, a success check, and the failure cases most drafts leave out — so every answer has the same scannable shape a customer can act on; paste it into every new draft when your articles are inconsistent, wordy, or quietly failing to resolve anything.
Open QA & QualityRoot-cause analysis (5 Whys) template
A fill-in 5 Whys worksheet for support quality: take a recurring problem — a reopen spike, a repeat DSAT theme, a ticket type QA keeps flagging — past the symptom to a root cause you can actually change, then assign a countermeasure, an owner, and a recheck date.
Open Support OpsSupport headcount & budget worksheet
A fill-in-the-blanks worksheet that turns forecast contact volume into a defensible frontline headcount number and a full support budget — labor loaded correctly, plus tooling, management, QA, and training — so you can walk into a planning meeting with a model instead of a guess.
Open Support OpsSupport runbook & known-issue register
A known-issue register plus a per-issue runbook entry, so every rep recognises a recurring or in-flight problem, hands out the same tested workaround, and stops re-diagnosing what the team already understands.
Open QA & QualitySupport voice & tone guide
The single standard for how your team sounds to a customer — the constant voice, a situation-by-situation tone matrix, the words to use and ban, and a pre-send gate — so a week-two hire and every AI-drafted reply land like your calmest rep; adopt it when replies read inconsistent, robotic, or off-key on hard tickets.
OpenChecklists
AI pilot readiness checklist
A pre-flight checklist to run before you switch on an AI support pilot, covering baselines, a failure condition written in advance, a control group, hard tickets, a human offramp, data/privacy sign-off, and outcome-based measurement — use it so the pilot can tell you the truth instead of flattering the tool.
Open People & CareersBurnout early-warning checklist
A scan of the early, observable signs that a support rep or a whole team is heading toward burnout — each paired with a concrete, supportive intervention — for managers to run on a regular cadence rather than after someone hands in notice.
Open Support OpsEscalation handling checklist
A run-once-per-escalation checklist a rep or lead works top to bottom — confirm severity, gather context, set the customer's expectations, package a cold-start-proof handoff, hold ownership until it's acknowledged, and close the loop — so escalations move fast and no one inherits a ticket with no context.
Open Tooling & StackHelpdesk migration checklist
A step-by-step checklist for moving from one helpdesk to another — audit and de-risk before you export, verify the import during cutover, and confirm everything works before you decommission the old tool.
Open People & CareersSupport hiring interview kit
A full interview loop for hiring frontline support reps — role scorecard, screening questions, a realistic ticket-response exercise, values/empathy questions, and a weighted scoring rubric — for when a vibe-based hire keeps burning you.
Open Knowledge & Self-ServiceKnowledge base health audit
A run-it-yourself audit that scores your knowledge base across seven dimensions — coverage, freshness, findability, duplicates, broken links, ownership, and self-service success — so you can see where it's helping and where it's quietly costing you tickets.
Open People & CareersNew rep first-week checklist
A day-by-day checklist for a new support rep's first five days — accounts and access, tools, product basics, the team's voice, shadowing, and first supervised tickets — used to get a hire set up and safely into reviewed customer replies without running a solo queue yet.
Open Support OpsPeak-season readiness checklist
A countdown checklist that takes a support team from forecast to post-mortem for a known volume spike (holiday, launch, enrolment) — use it starting six to eight weeks out to protect your SLAs and your team.
Open Knowledge & Self-ServiceSelf-service deflection audit checklist
An audit that separates real self-service resolution from customers who quietly gave up, so the deflection rate you report reflects problems actually solved — run it quarterly, or before you cite a deflection figure to anyone who controls budget.
Open Tooling & StackMacro / saved-reply audit checklist
A structured audit for an existing macro / saved-reply library — eight passes that surface the dead, inaccurate, robotic, duplicated, and side-effect-laden replies and sort every one into keep, fix, merge, or retire; run it quarterly so the library stays small, current, and worth reaching for.
Open AI in SupportAI customer disclosure & human-choice checklist
An implementation checklist for customer-facing chatbots, messaging agents, voice AI, and automated replies: inventory every path, approve the disclosure, make human choice real, preserve context, log evidence, test accessibility, rehearse failure, and maintain the control after launch.
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