I’ve spent years combing through mountains of agent and bot transcripts — chat, email, social, SMS, voice-to-text — looking for the subtle patterns that quietly push conversations toward costly escalations. Those triggers are rarely dramatic: they’re buried in phrasing, timing, handoffs and...
Sep 16, 2026
• by Claire Moreau
Latest News from Customer Carenumber Co
I recently ran a blind A/B trial to compare GPT-assisted agent replies with responses written by experienced agents, and it taught me a lot about balancing experimental rigor with the compliance and safety needs every support operation must meet. If you’re thinking of testing generative AI in live support, this is a practical playbook you can apply straight away — how I set up the trial, the...
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When I run audits for support teams, one thing I’m always asked is: “Can we tweak the chatbot prompt and actually improve CSAT without making conversations longer?” The short answer is yes — and the way to find that single high-impact prompt is through a focused, one-week audit that balances quantitative signals with lightweight qualitative testing.In this post I’ll walk you through the...
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When a leadership team asks me whether they should replace phone support with asynchronous chat, the real question is rarely about preference. It’s about money, capacity, and customer experience. The word “replace” hides a lot of trade-offs: cost per contact, resolution time, customer satisfaction, and the impact on workforce design. In this piece I’ll walk you through a pragmatic,...
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I’m going to show you a practical, low-friction way to tag and quantify emotional effort in support tickets using only the fields you already have and three simple NLP rules. This is not a research paper or a deep-learning play—it's a method you can implement in a week, iterate on with real data, and use to guide quick operational improvements in your support flow.Why emotional effort matters...
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I want to share a playbook I've been refining for teams that want to stop escalations before they happen: preemptive refunds. This isn't about handing out money to avoid work — it's about thoughtful, data-driven interventions that preserve customer trust, reduce unnecessary tickets, and free your agents to solve the most valuable problems. Over the past few years I’ve run experiments across...
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Scaling multilingual omnichannel support without increasing headcount is absolutely possible — I've done it with teams ranging from ten to a few hundred agents. The trick is to combine pragmatic automation, smarter routing, and a targeted human augmentation strategy so you serve more customers across channels and languages while keeping quality steady. Below is a one-week playbook you can...
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I recently ran a seven-day sprint to measure the true ROI of a GPT-assisted agent workflow, and I want to share the exact approach I used so you can replicate it. When vendors promise “faster replies” and “higher CSAT” with large language models (LLMs), what they rarely provide is a simple, repeatable framework for quantifying the business impact in your environment quickly. This is that...
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I’ve spent years helping support teams stitch together people, processes and platforms so that technology genuinely improves customer outcomes. When generative AI assistants enter the picture, one of the first questions I hear from teams in regulated industries is: “How do we prove what the AI did and when a human took over?” Building an auditable human handover trail isn’t just about...
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I ran a one-week experiment in my support team to answer a simple but important question: how do GPT-assisted agent replies affect CSAT and handle time? We’ve all seen glossy vendor decks claiming AI will cut handle times and boost satisfaction simultaneously, but in practice those goals can conflict. I wanted a pragmatic, measurable test that would tell us what actually happens when agents use...
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When you update your knowledge base, how do you know whether that work actually reduced incoming contact volume — and which channels benefited? I’ve spent years helping support teams move from intuition to measurable outcomes, and one of the most reliable levers is tracking deflection attributed to knowledge updates. The challenge has always been practical: tickets are created across chat,...
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