support-operations
Designs and runs the support function — channels, queues, routing, staffing, service levels, quality, and the metrics that show whether it is working. Use this to set up or fix support operations, choose channels, size a team, set or renegotiate service levels, reduce cost per contact, diagnose long queues or poor quality, or decide what to automate.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount /tmp/support-operations && cp -r /tmp/support-operations/plugins/customer-experience/skills/support-operations ~/.claude/skills/support-operationsSKILL.md
# Support operations ## Understand demand before designing supply Categorize a real sample of recent contacts — a few hundred, read individually, not a report. Almost every support operation finds the same shape: a small number of causes generating most of the volume, and most of those are preventable rather than answerable. That analysis decides everything downstream. Staffing to demand you have not examined means staffing to demand you could have eliminated. ## The hierarchy of handling In order of cost, cheapest first. Push volume up this list rather than getting faster at the bottom: 1. **Eliminate** — fix the product defect or confusing flow generating the contact. 2. **Deflect** — answer it in the interface at the moment of confusion, not in a help center nobody visits. 3. **Self-serve** — findable documentation for people who go looking. 4. **Automate** — genuine resolution of routine requests, not a bot that stalls people before a human. 5. **Assist** — a person. Most support improvement programs work on level 5 exclusively, because it is the visible one. ## Channels Pick by what the work needs, not by what is fashionable. Asynchronous channels are cheaper and better for anything requiring investigation. Synchronous channels are worth their cost for urgency, high-value accounts, and anything where a customer is stuck mid-task. Every channel you open must be staffed to its expectation. An unstaffed live-chat widget is worse than no chat. ## Service levels Set by severity and customer tier, published internally, and — this is the part usually missing — **checked against actual capacity before being promised**. A commitment the staffing cannot meet is a commitment to fail visibly. Measure first response and time to resolution separately. They have different causes: first response is a staffing problem, resolution is usually a product or escalation problem. ## Metrics that mean something - **Contacts per active customer**, trending. The only metric that captures whether the product is getting better rather than the team getting faster. - **First-contact resolution** — reopens are the honest signal. - **Backlog age distribution**, not average age. Averages hide the tickets rotting at the back, and those are the ones that become complaints. - **Customer-effort**, asked at resolution. Be careful with time-to-close and volume handled. Both are easily gamed and both reward closing over solving. ## Staffing Size to peak-hour concurrency, not to daily volume — queues form in hours, not days. Model the shrinkage honestly: training, breaks, meetings, leave. A plan assuming full utilization understaffs by a wide margin and then blames the team. ## Quality Review a sample of resolved contacts against a rubric agreed with the team, and coach against it. Reviewing only escalations trains for defense rather than quality. ## Tooling Ticketing: Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Front, Help Scout, and similar; Jira Service Management where support and engineering work one queue. Knowledge base: usually the ticketing tool's own, or Confluence, Notion, or Guru. Quality review and workforce management — Klaus, Assembled, and similar — start paying off once you staff shifts rather than a team. Before that they are overhead. ## Never - Staff to average volume. Support arrives in peaks. - Publish a service level you have not staffed to meet. - Manage on handle time. It optimizes for closing tickets, not for solving problems. - Let a repeat driver stay a support problem. Route it to whoever owns the cause.
Corporate Strategy (CSO). Owns plugins/corporate-strategy/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Customer Experience (CCO). Owns plugins/customer-experience/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Data & Analytics (CDO). Owns plugins/data-analytics/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Demand Generation (CMO). Owns plugins/demand-generation/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Office of the CEO. Owns plugins/executive/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Finance (CFO). Owns plugins/finance/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Corporate IT. Owns plugins/it-operations/** and nothing else. Delegate service desk, systems and network administration, virtualization and cloud, telephony and conferencing, endpoints, assets, identity lifecycle, and backup work here.
Reviewer-class. Read-only review of what other departments commit to — contract terms, privacy and data handling, risk acceptance, and compliance findings. Holds no write surface. Its findings are not overrulable by the department under review.