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: