In my experience, one of the trickiest measurement problems in digital support is proving that knowledge base updates actually cause deflection lift. Teams often have the intuition—searches drop, contact volume falls—but without a consistent event schema across channels it's nearly impossible...
Jan 06, 2026
• by Claire Moreau
Latest News from Customer Carenumber Co
When I first started experimenting with sentiment analysis in a ticketing system, I expected a quick win: drop in manual triage, faster escalations, happier customers. What I found was more nuanced and, ultimately, more valuable. Sentiment isn't a magic wand — it's a signal. Done well, it helps your team prioritize, improve coaching, and spot trends before they become crises. Done poorly, it...
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Running a vendor trial for an AI assistant is one of those projects that looks deceptively straightforward until you’re three vendors in and your inbox is full of demo recordings, feature matrices, and slippery promises about “human-like” understanding. I’ve run more than a few trials like this, and the difference between a trial that leads to a successful deployment and one that wastes...
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I run quarterly CX retrospectives because monthly fire-fighting and weekly stand-ups rarely create the space to learn deliberately. Over the years I’ve seen retros devolve into complaint sessions — a room where every pain point is aired but nothing changes. In this post I’ll share a reproducible template I use at Customer Carenumber Co (https://www.customer-carenumber.co.uk) to run a...
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When teams ask me whether they should automate a touchpoint or send a customer to a human, I always push back: the right choice isn’t binary. It’s a sequence of decisions guided by risk, value, frequency, and the customer’s context. Over the past decade I’ve seen the best outcomes come from a practical framework that combines data, customer empathy, and fast experiments. Below I share a...
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When I started helping support teams shift from channel-based organisation to outcome-focused squads, I expected resistance — but what surprised me most was how often teams hadn’t even agreed on the outcomes they were trying to deliver. Channels are easy to see: you can count phone lines, chat sessions, and inboxes. Outcomes are messier because they require judgement, measurement, and...
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Supporting regulated industries — healthcare, finance, telecoms, utilities, and similar — forces you to be precise about escalation workflows. I’ve built and reviewed workflows for teams operating under strict SLAs, audit trails, and privacy constraints, and I still lean on a handful of practical rules whenever I design or evaluate an escalation path. This compact guide walks through what...
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I’ve spent more than a decade helping support teams design processes that keep customers calm and teams focused during incidents. One of the most reliable levers I’ve found is a well-drafted cross-functional incident runbook: a living document that defines who does what, when, and how we talk to customers. Done right, it reduces escalations, shortens resolution times, and — importantly —...
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When I help teams prove the value of self-service content, the most common problem I see is an appetite for perfect measurement that never turns into action. Teams design complex tracking schemas, wait for months of noisy data, then decide measurement is "too hard" and revert to opinion-based decisions.I've learned to flip that script: start with a minimal data collection plan that answers the...
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When I work with product and support teams on onboarding, I stop thinking about "onboarding" as a single linear process and start thinking about a conversation made of signals. Every click, message, error, and delay is a signal that tells you whether a trial user is moving toward activation — or toward churn. Designing an onboarding support journey around these signals is the fastest,...
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I often get asked how to run fast, low-risk experiments that actually tell you whether a new automation or conversational flow is worth rolling out. Recently I needed to compare Intercom’s outbound flow/series approach with our existing live conversation model — and instead of a vague pilot, I designed a one-week experiment that gave clear, actionable results. Below I share the exact approach...
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