Support operations

Understand demand before designing supply

Categorize a real sample of recent contacts, a few hundred, read individually, not a report. Almost every support operation finds the same shape: a small number of causes generating most of the volume, and most of those are preventable rather than answerable.

That analysis decides everything downstream. Staffing to demand you have not examined means staffing to demand you could have eliminated.

The hierarchy of handling

In order of cost, cheapest first. Push volume up this list rather than getting faster at the bottom:

1. Eliminate, fix the product defect or confusing flow generating the contact.
2. Deflect, answer it in the interface at the moment of confusion, not in a help center nobody visits.
3. Self-serve, findable documentation for people who go looking.
4. Automate, genuine resolution of routine requests, not a bot that stalls people before a human.
5. Assist, a person.

Most support improvement programs work on level 5 exclusively, because it is the visible one.

Channels

Pick by what the work needs, not by what is fashionable. Asynchronous channels are cheaper and better for anything requiring investigation. Synchronous channels are worth their cost for urgency, high-value accounts, and anything where a customer is stuck mid-task.

Every channel you open must be staffed to its expectation. An unstaffed live-chat widget is worse than no chat.

Service levels

Set by severity and customer tier, published internally, and, this is the part usually missing, checked against actual capacity before being promised. A commitment the staffing cannot meet is a commitment to fail visibly.

Measure first response and time to resolution separately. They have different causes: first response is a staffing problem, resolution is usually a product or escalation problem.

Metrics that mean something