Tagged support-ops
Essays and field notes tagged support-ops.
The Weekly Reading
The most important part of running an AI support agent was an hour a week where two people read what it had actually said to customers.
What Should Never Be Automated
Every report was classified before a human saw it. The share that went to the agent is the number people ask about. The rest decided what the team became.
The Queue Looked Fine on Monday
We were making staffing decisions on week-old data. The fix was a small Python app.
The Agent Was Wrong All Tuesday
A demo runs on a world the system already knows. Production hands it a bug that appeared this morning, and the agent answers confidently all day.
WPML Doesn't Work With My Shop
The vague tickets are often the most useful. Compatibility work taught me that the bug lives between products — and someone has to own that space.
Measure the Queue, Not the Bot
Deflection dashboards always go up. Resolution rate can be gamed too. What worked for us was refusing to give the AI its own scoreboard.
Scaling Support Without Hiring
The part nobody talks about is the years of unglamorous groundwork before it - and what the team became after.
Your Ticket Queue Is a Defect Log
The operating model I inherited was the obvious one - volume goes up, you hire. The queue never got smaller by clearing it faster.