Part Two: The product · Trouble and change
Automated help is cheap and answers most questions. When something serious goes wrong, meeting a chatbot tells the customer they are on their own.
Most questions are small and have been asked before. How do I change my email address? Where is the export? A good help page or an automated reply settles these faster than a person could, at any hour. Nobody minds.
The trouble is the other kind. A travel agent has a family standing at a check-in desk in Lisbon. The booking tool shows their flight as cancelled, and the airline says it is not. The agent opens the help widget, and a cheerful assistant offers three articles about managing bookings. Typing "agent" gets a form and a promise of a reply within two business days. The flight leaves in ninety minutes.
From the company's side, nothing unusual happened. Support is a cost, and every layer between a customer and a person lowers it. The saving is counted every month. The agent's morning is counted nowhere, which is the trouble MEASURE PROGRESS, NOT ATTENTION (29) describes. Anyone on the team can count it: walk the path a locked-out customer has to take, time it, and show the number to whoever sets the support budget.
From the customer's side, it is the day they found out what the company is like. People forgive a failure far more easily than being left alone with one. Where a company is the customer, this is the morning its staff remember when the contract comes up for renewal.
Serious trouble is rare, which is what makes this affordable. No company can staff a person for every question. It can staff one for the few that involve money, lost work, a locked account or a deadline.
Therefore:
Let automation answer the small questions. When money, lost work, a deadline or a locked account is at stake, give people a short, visible route to a person who can act, and say truthfully how long it takes.
In practice. Pretend your account has been wrongly locked. Starting from the login page, count the steps and the hours until a person who can fix it reads your message. Then shorten that one path.
Goes with. When the fault is yours, the person who answers should OWN THE MISTAKE (53). Fewer people need rescuing when NOTHING IS LOST (55). The people who build the product should read these conversations: MAKERS CLOSE TO CUSTOMERS (18).