Approach
LET ME BE YOUR AGENT.
Give me the same tools, information and processes your agents work with, and let me experience what happens when your customer needs something solved.
I want to see the job
from where your agents sit.
There’s gold hidden in firsthand frontline experience that stats alone won’t show you.
A report can tell me how long a ticket took to resolve, how often it was reassigned, or how many times an agent escalated something. It can’t always tell me what happened in the moments between those numbers.
Maybe the agent had to search three systems for one piece of information. Maybe they knew exactly what the customer needed but weren’t allowed to do it. Maybe there’s a workaround everyone on the team knows about, but nobody outside the team even knows exists.
I want to find those things.
What can they see?
Do they have the information they need when they need it?
What can they solve?
What can they resolve themselves, and what has to be escalated?
Where do they have to wait?
For information, approval, another person or another department?
What gets in their way?
Systems, handovers, duplicate work, unclear processes or missing access?
ON PAPER ≠ IN PRACTICE
Let me
try to
solve it.
Give me the tools, the access and the process.
I want to see where I get stuck — and why.
HOW THIS WORKS
Close enough to experience the real job.
The exact setup will depend on your operation. Where possible, I want to work with the same systems, information and processes your agents use and handle real customer situations myself.
Sometimes that may mean working live tickets. In other environments, it might mean shadowing agents, working through recent cases, using a test environment or sitting alongside someone while they solve them.
The point isn’t to pretend I’m an employee. It’s to get close enough to the work that I can experience the friction for myself.
WHY I WORK THIS WAY
This approach came from being on the other side of the process.
I’ve spent years working in customer service and CS management, across companies that handled customer service very differently. A lot of what I believe about improving it came from seeing the same kind of disconnect again and again.
A problem can look one way from a report, a meeting or a KPI, and quite different when you’re the person actually trying to solve it.
I’ve worked with changes that made perfect sense at management level but achieved very little on the frontline. I’ve had the information I needed buried across different systems, known exactly what a customer needed but lacked the authority to do it, and escalated problems simply because there was nowhere else for them to go.
That’s why I want to see the work for myself.
LOOK BEYOND THE AGENT
Poor customer service doesn't always start in customer service.
When handling times rise, escalations pile up or customers keep coming back with the same problem, it’s natural to look at the people handling the tickets.
Maybe they need more training. Maybe they need better scripts, closer management or more pressure on productivity.
And sometimes they do. But an agent can only work with the information, access, authority and processes they’re given. The real problem might be a website that creates unnecessary questions, a system that doesn’t show what they need, a policy that forces an escalation, or another department they have to wait for.
If we only look at the agent, we can end up trying to improve the person working around the problem instead of the thing creating it.
BEFORE YOU ADD MORE
First, find out why what you already have isn't working better.
When handling times rise, escalations pile up or customers keep coming back with the same problem, it’s natural to look at the people handling the tickets.
Maybe they need more training. Maybe they need better scripts, closer management or more pressure on productivity.
And sometimes they do. But an agent can only work with the information, access, authority and processes they’re given. The real problem might be a website that creates unnecessary questions, a system that doesn’t show what they need, a policy that forces an escalation, or another department they have to wait for.
If we only look at the agent, we can end up trying to improve the person working around the problem instead of the thing creating it.