Blog
Blog
Returns, and the Note Nobody Had a Box For
From where you are sitting a return is the tail end of a sale running backwards. What is going on at the other end is a person in their own hall, still wanting the thing they wanted a fortnight ago.
Average Handle Time, and Why It Falls When the Work Gets Worse
Average handle time is the total time your people spend working on tickets divided by the number handled. Handle time counts work; nearly every figure quoted as handle time counts waiting as well.
Support Ticket Priority Matrix, Filled In and Ready to Argue With
A support ticket priority matrix sets a ticket’s priority from impact and urgency. Cross the two, read one level off the grid from P1 down to P4, and work in that order. Ours is filled in and you are meant to change it.
Outcome-Based Pricing for AI Support: What a Resolution Costs, and Who Decides It Was One
Outcome-based pricing charges you for results instead of for seats. The trouble is not the idea of it: a per resolution quote is not a price at all, it is a price multiplied by an assumption.
First Response Time, and Why the Average Is Not What Anybody Waited
First response time is the gap between a customer’s message arriving and a person replying to it. An average is one number and a queue is not one number, and that is where most desks lose the run of it.
Gmail Sending Limits, and the Day Your Desk Hits One
A paid Google Workspace account can send 2,000 messages a day, a personal Gmail 500. That is the whole answer, and it is almost never the limit that stops a support desk.
Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 Support, and Where the Line Between Them Actually Sits
Tier 1 answers the tickets whose answer is already written down. Tier 2 takes the ones that need an account opened up. Tier 3 alters the product its self. The line between them is not a line of skill.
Outlook Shared Mailbox vs Microsoft 365 Group vs Distribution List, Decided Properly
The quickest way to tell the three apart is to ask where the mail actually lives. Three addresses that look identical from the outside, three completely different rooms behind the door.
AI Agent vs Chatbot vs Canned Reply, and Who Is Actually Deciding
A canned reply is a saved answer that a person chooses to send. A chatbot is a decision tree built in advance, a menu wearing a conversation. An AI agent reads the thing in front of it and decides in the moment.
Cost per Ticket: How to Work It Out, and the Spring It Lies to You
Cost per ticket is everything your support desk costs you in a month, divided by the number of tickets it handled in that same month. That is the entire formula, and it is the mechanism underneath it that catches people.
What Is a Service Desk? The One Door, and What Comes Through It
A service desk is the one door a company has agreed its requests go through, with a name against each request and a record of what became of it, and the whole weight of the idea sits on the word one.
AI Customer Service Statistics for 2026, and Who Went and Counted Them
Most AI support statistics are forecasts about 2029 being quoted as measurements of today. Here are the nine that survived, with their dates, their collectors and their sample sizes on them.
Help Desk Pricing Models Explained: Per Agent vs Per Workspace vs Per Resolution vs Tiered
Per agent charges you for the people who can log in. Per workspace charges the one account and stops looking at your head count after that. Each of the four decides something besides the size of your bill.
When a Shared Inbox Becomes a Ticketing System
A shared inbox is one address that a few of you can read at the same time. A ticketing system is that very same mail with a record fastened onto it, meaning an owner, a state, a clock, and a history that stays put.
SLA Compliance, and Why the Number Is Kinder Than the Desk
SLA compliance is the share of the promises you made about time which you then went and kept, worked out as a percentage and handed over to whoever it was that asked you for it. Straightforward enough as an idea.
Google Collaborative Inbox, and the Five Places It Stops
A Collaborative Inbox is a Google Group with the extra features switched on, so that mail sent to the one address lands in the one place, and whoever is in the group can put their name against a conversation and mark it finished when it is finished.
What IT Asset Management Actually Is, and Why the Register Goes Wrong on the Good Days
IT asset management is the ordinary work of knowing what hardware and software a company owns, who is holding each piece of it at the minute, what the whole of it costs every month, and when a thing comes back or gets switched off.
What a Knowledge Management System Actually Is, and Why the Phone Call Keeps Hiding the Problem
A knowledge management system is the organised place a company keeps what it knows, written down and searchable and owned by somebody, so that an answer gets found rather than worked out a second time by whoever happens to be asking.
What Customer Self Service Actually Is, and Why Reading Is Not the Same as Doing
Customer self service is any arrangement that lets a person get what they came to you for without going through one of your people at all, so they find the answer them selves, or make the change them selves, at eleven at night or on a Sunday.
What CSAT Means, and Why the Best Person on Your Desk Can Score the Worst
CSAT is short for customer satisfaction score, and the whole of it is one question put to somebody at the end of a conversation. The sum was never the difficulty. The difficulty is what the number quietly measures instead.
Omnichannel Customer Service, and the Shop That Answered the Same Woman Three Times
Omnichannel customer service is the notion that somebody can reach you down whatever road suits them of an evening, and get one continuous conversation out of the whole of it instead of a cold start every time they move.
What Customer Care Actually Is, and Why Three Polite Answers Still Lost the Customer
Customer care is the whole of what happens to a person after they have paid you, the answering and the remembering and the holding of some small thing until it is finished, and it goes by the name of care in a good many trades on account of the word service having been worn thin.
Ecommerce Customer Service, and Why the Queue Answers the Wrong Mails Fastest
Ecommerce customer service is every mail that arrives because somebody bought a thing off you online, or is standing there thinking about buying one, and the lot of it lands in the same inbox with nothing on the outside to tell the two sorts apart.
Choosing Customer Service Software When You Are Six People and Support Is Nobody’s Actual Job
There is a particular class of shopping that starts the day a small business admits the mail has got away from it altogether, and it nearly always begins with a search and a page of tools with tick boxes down the side of them.
What Customer Success Actually Is, and Why the Quiet Accounts Are the Ones That Go
Customer success is the business of making sure a customer gets the thing they wanted out of what they bought off you, which is a different job to answering them when they write in, and a different job again to ringing them when the renewal is due.
What a Distribution List Actually Is, and Why Client Mail Keeps Falling Through One
A distribution list is an address with no mailbox sat behind it. Mail arrives at the address, gets copied out to everybody on the list, and the address its self keeps nothing, holds nothing, and remembers nothing about what happened next.
Call Center or Not: What a Small Team Actually Needs Before It Buys a Phone Line
Ask most people what a call center is and they will hand you the room, the rows of headsets, the hold music, a crew of people who do nothing the whole of the day but take the calls and make the calls a business needs handled.
Customer Service Examples Worth Copying: What Good and Bad Actually Look Like in the Mail
A customer service example is a real reply that a real person sent to a real customer on a real morning, and the thing that happened after it, and that is the whole of it.
The Customer Service Experience No One Sits Down and Designs: What a Small Team Actually Needs
The customer service experience is the whole of what a person is left feeling once they have dealt with your shop about something, the sum of the waiting and the answering and the being-remembered or the not.
The Incident Management No Small Shop Plans For: What Happens Between the Breaking and the Fixing
Incident management is the whole of what a shop does in the stretch of time between a thing going wrong and the thing being put right, and, just as much, it is what the shop says to the people that the wrong thing landed on while they sit there waiting on it.
Retention Rate: How to Work It Out, What Good Looks Like, and When the Number Lies
Your retention rate is the share of the customers you had at the start of a stretch of time who are still with you at the end of it, and the whole quarrel with the number is that it counts the ones who stayed while telling you nothing whatever about the ones who went.
Customer Support for a Small Team: What to Do When a Shared Inbox Starts Costing You Customers
Customer support is the whole of what a business does for a person after that person has already handed over their money and their trust, the answering of the questions and the sorting of the muddles and the making-good of the things that went wrong.
Gmail Alternative for Teams: What to Do When a Shared Inbox Starts Costing You Customers
A Gmail alternative is whatever a business reaches for once a plain Gmail account has quietly stopped being able to hold the shared work that has grown up inside it.
What Is ITSM? A Plain Answer, and the Day “Just Ask Niall” Stops Working
IT service management is the whole of how a company runs the IT that its people lean on all day, the fixing of the broken things and the handing out of the accounts and the laptops and the access.
What Is Customer Service? A Plain Answer, and Where It Actually Gets Decided
Customer service is the whole of what a business does to look after the people who buy from it, the answering of their questions and the sorting of their troubles and the being reachable and decent on the day a thing has gone wrong.
FAQ Page Design: How to Build One People Actually Read
A well designed FAQ page takes the questions your customers genuinely keep asking, puts the most asked one first, and answers each one in plain words with the answer sitting in the very first sentence.
What a Helpdesk Actually Is (and When a Shared Inbox Stops Being One)
A helpdesk is the thing that happens when questions start arriving faster than one person can hold them in their head. That is the whole of it, really, underneath the software and the dashboards.
Customer Retention Strategies: How to Keep the Customers You Already Have
Customer retention strategies are the deliberate things a business does to keep the customers it has already won, so those people stay and buy again instead of drifting off quietly to somebody else.
Escalation: What It Means, How to Build a Path, and the Matrix to Copy
Escalation is what happens when a support ticket stops being solvable by the person holding it and has to move, either sideways to somebody who knows the system deeper, or upward to somebody carrying the authority.
Churn Rate Analysis: How to Measure and Understand Customer Churn
Churn rate analysis means measuring the number of customers who stop paying you in a given period, and then studying the data to understand who exactly is leaving and why they are leaving.
Customer Satisfaction Metrics: How to Measure What Customers Actually Feel
Customer satisfaction metrics are the numbers a support team keeps so it can tell how the customers are feeling about the help, how fast the help is arriving, and whether the answers held up after the conversation closed.
What Is a Knowledge Base? The Plain Answer, With Examples
A knowledge base is an organised library of help articles on your website, the answers to your customers' usual questions written down properly in the one place, so a person can go and find what they need on their own instead of writing in and waiting on a reply.