Playbooks
Practitioner playbooks on running customer service in the real world. Written from twenty years on the floor — contact centers, biopharma support, healthcare SaaS — not twenty years in a vendor boardroom. Built for the team of one to five who got handed CS and is trying to make it work.
Small teams copy enterprise response promises, miss them within a month, and train customers not to believe anything they say. Build SLAs backwards from real capacity instead: honest tiers keyed to impact, published windows with published hours, automation that buys time honestly, and a breach protocol for the weeks it goes wrong.
A generic 1-5 CSAT tells you the room is basically fine and hides the exact customer about to leave. The sharper post-resolution question, the three individual-level signals that actually predict churn — effort, the unresolved feeling, repeat contacts — and the weekly ritual of closing the loop on the detractors.
Your customers hit send at 11pm, midnight, Sunday morning — and the response clock starts then, not when you wake up. How to cover the after-hours queue without an overnight hire or a reckless bot: acknowledge instantly, auto-handle the bounded 60%, queue every judgment call for morning.
A third to half of your tickets are questions you've already answered. You don't have a content problem, you have a capture problem. The workflow that turns the support you're already doing into a self-serve KB — stop authoring, start harvesting.
The fear with AI support isn't that it answers tickets — it's that it confidently mishandles the one that mattered. The triage line: a stakes-by-confidence framework for what to auto-handle, what to draft for approval, and what must reach a human every time.
A template system your customers can't detect: the 70/30 rule, the three human seams, the five-template core library, quarterly rot review, and where AI fits — from twenty years in contact centers.
The all-caps email landed and your instinct is to defend yourself — that's the mistake. The de-escalation framework from twenty years running contact centers: acknowledge before you solve, the six moves that calm a furious customer, and the polite lines that quietly make it worse.
The actual operating model for solo customer service: 24-hour backlog rescue protocol, five systems to install, honest read on what AI does and doesn't do for the team of one.