Over a couple of weeks, my company closed 51 of 52 customer-support issues. I saw 98 percent and felt pretty good about it. Then we sorted the tickets by what had actually gone wrong, and 39 of the 52 were Slack-access problems.
We had repaired one broken way of entering our community 39 times. And called it a great week. This is the slightly embarrassing thing about customer support: you can get very efficient at cleaning up a mess your own company keeps making.
It doesn’t matter whether the company is enormous, tiny, or just you selling something after work. The minute somebody pays and can’t get what they thought they bought, you have a support problem.
I spent enough years at Amazon that the customer-obsession part of my brain is probably never going away. So here’s the version that applies to you even if you’ve never touched a support queue. The person waiting on an internal report, the colleague locked out of a system, the client chasing a document nobody sent — they’re all living in the gap between the promise and what happened.
Seeing the 39 Slack cases together changed the question for me. I had started out wondering how an agent could help us answer support faster. Now I wanted to know why we were making so many people ask us for the same help.
That’s why I think support is the best place to start with agents. The work is concrete, the customer tells you when you’re wrong, and the history is already sitting in an inbox. Three payoffs from one stream of work: the customer gets a faster answer, the team stops running the same scavenger hunt, and the product gets better. I can’t think of another agent job that does all three.
That work shows up in finance, software access, sales research and product bugs. I’ll come back to that, because a case study you can’t act on is just a story about my company.
This briefing covers:
Where the time goes. We timed every step of a support ticket and found the reply was the cheap part, and reconstructing the customer across half a dozen systems was the expensive one.
What it looks like when the agent owns the whole loop. Gumroad’s support agent found a charting bug, wrote the test, shipped the fix, and then got the design wrong in a way only the customer could catch.
The same job outside a support inbox. Invoices without purchase orders, access requests, account history, ten people reporting one bug: same shape, same method.
How to run this on your last 50 tickets. The prompt that sorts them by root cause instead of subject line, plus a five-prompt kit and companion guide that take you from one annoying problem to a pilot you can check.
Start with the time study, because everything else depends on knowing what the work costs.
