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...
Jun 27, 2026
• by Claire Moreau
Latest News from Customer Carenumber Co
I want to walk you through a practical, lightweight approach I’ve used to catch problems early in chat channels: a three-metric early-warning system derived from chat transcripts that predicts when a conversation is likely to escalate or when a customer will reopen a ticket. This isn’t an academic exercise — it’s a pragmatic toolkit you can implement with transcript exports, a bit of NLP,...
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I run a lot of vendor trials for support teams, and one lesson keeps resurfacing: a standard seven-day trial rarely reveals the full cost of switching platforms. Vendors make their modern UIs and canned automations look effortless, but the long-term expenses — training, migration complexity, custom workflows, and maintenance — are where budgets and timelines actually get spent. In this post...
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When a chatbot hands a conversation off to a human and the customer leaves frustrated, nobody wins. Yet failed handoffs are common — unclear context, long wait times, repeated questions, and agents who lack the right information. Over the past decade I've helped teams turn those moments from pain points into measurable CX wins. Here’s a sprint-ready playbook you can run in two weeks to...
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I often see product and support teams aim for two goals that can feel at odds: increase self-service deflection to reduce live handling, and keep identity risk tightly controlled. In practice you don't have to choose one or the other. With a privacy-first approach to proactive outreach, you can nudge the right customers toward secure self-serve paths while avoiding unnecessary exposure of...
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I’ve evaluated dozens of chat and messaging platforms while helping support teams scale omnichannel programs across Europe. When you’re operating in the mid-market — not a tiny startup but not a global enterprise either — the choice between Zendesk, Intercom, and Freshdesk often comes down to a combination of product fit, localisation capabilities, automation flexibility, and predictable...
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I’ve been in the thick of incident comms for years — from small SaaS outages to multi-region platform failures — and one lesson keeps coming back: customers will forgive a problem if you communicate clearly, quickly, and honestly. The challenge is doing that in a world where attention is scarce. Here’s a practical playbook I use to compress incident communications into a 60-second...
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I want to walk you through a practical audit checklist I use when hunting for the one knowledge article that can deliver a meaningful deflection lift—typically in the 8–12% range—for a digital support channel. This is the kind of win that scales: one well-placed, well-written article that customers actually find and use can reduce ticket volume, shorten handle time on remaining contacts,...
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When teams roll out GPT-based support assistants, the focus often lands on speed, deflection rates and the wow factor of conversational AI. What’s less sexy but far more critical is building a fail-safe human handover policy that prevents compliance slip-ups. I’ve seen the gap between automated responses and safe, compliant human escalation lead to embarrassing — and sometimes costly —...
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I recently ran a small experiment that tested generative AI replies against our existing templated responses. The goal wasn’t to prove one approach was universally better — it was to learn fast, protect our Net Promoter Score (NPS), and give agents and customers a clearly measurable experience. If you’re thinking about doing the same, here’s a pragmatic, lightweight A/B framework you can...
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I used to love macros. They promised consistency, speed, and a way to scale support without hiring an army. But over the years I watched the very thing meant to speed conversations quietly erode one of the hardest-earned metrics in support: CSAT. In countless Zendesk instances and similar ticketing systems, macros become templates of convenience that forget the person behind the ticket. The...
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