For five years I’ve worked in technical support for a software product with thousands of users. Most days that means a few dozen conversations. Some are technical, some are about billing, and some come from people who just want to know whether they broke something.
In those years, AI tools went from a novelty to something every support team is weighing up. And they do a lot of this work well: they find the right help article in a second, draft a clear first answer, sum up a forty-message thread, and never get tired at eleven at night. For a question like “how do I add someone to my account?”, that’s often enough.
An integration that isn’t working
Take a message I get often: “The integration isn’t working.” It can be a plain technical question. It can also mean “we launch tomorrow, we’ve told every customer, and the data isn’t coming through.” The fix is the same, but the reply isn’t. The second person also needs one sentence telling them there’s still time.
Before I write anything, I look at that customer’s account. A list of ten possible causes helps nobody, and the cause is usually something specific: an expired API key, a permission someone removed by accident, a time zone set wrong.
Sometimes one reply doesn’t fix it. Some problems take three emails and a bug report to the developers, and the customer shouldn’t have to explain it again to each new person or bot. Someone has to keep hold of the thread until it’s done.
And sometimes the right call is to bend the rules: a refund just outside the window, an extra few days on a trial, a call instead of another email. Those are judgment calls, and they’re where a company shows what it’s like.
The reply people remember
Customers rarely remember a smooth week. They remember the evening something stopped working and someone sorted it out, and wrote to them like a person while doing it.
Let the tools take the repetitive work. That leaves your team time for those conversations.
If your team is working out how much of its support to automate, get in touch. I’m happy to talk it through.