Welcome to the third issue of Kind Support! I'm thrilled you're here. Every week, we’ll explore how empathy, AI, and kindness in customer support can transform experiences—keeping things human even in a world filled with automation.

This week, we’ll explore the Supermarket Staffing Dilemma, a personal dilemma I encountered while spending time in the Philippines.

🛒 The Supermarket Staffing Dilemma

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to live for several months in the Philippines (my spouse is from the Philippines, and I fell in love with the country), and I often found myself in a familiar but curious situation: a long queue at a supermarket checkout. What stood out wasn’t the line itself, I mean, we’ve all been there, but the setup. Each checkout lane had two staff members: one scanning and charging, the other bagging your groceries with care. It was warm, attentive, and oddly rare in today’s world. It’s like trying lounge access—once you do, going back feels a bit sad.

But sometimes the line would grow, and then you start wondering: Would this feel as good if I’d been waiting 15 minutes longer? What if the store had cut that staff-to-lane ratio in half and opened double the lanes? Or gone fully self-checkout, with a single person watching over several stations, like they do in many parts of Europe?

And this isn’t about supermarkets. It is about how we design support experiences.

Because the same questions (should) echo loudly in how companies are implementing AI in customer support.

Many think that AI will handle 90% of basic support inquiries and that we’ll have agents “overseeing” (or better, taking the escalations from) these AI bots.

Or will people still prefer that quiet human presence, the kind that bags your groceries carefully, even if it means waiting a little longer? Or lets you “keep on line” while the agent searches for information, but at least it's a human being on the other side looking to make your day feel better?

In a time when AI is growing more capable by the day, these choices matter more than ever. Speed and scale are tempting. But what we often forget is how deeply people remember feeling cared for, even in small, fleeting moments.

Having worked in retail, I remember how people came to ask a question or for a recommendation, even if they could have done everything online, and that was because they wanted that human experience. They remembered me by name; they wanted a sense of community, of belonging, not just some answers.

The checkout dilemma becomes a chatbot dilemma: Do we design support for efficiency, or do we design it for empathy? (And I’m not saying we can’t do both, but the solution isn’t as simple as firing an entire CS department or avoiding AI altogether.)

Sometimes, it’s true, kindness doesn’t scale. But maybe it doesn’t have to, maybe it just needs to be present when it matters most.

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Welcome to second issue of Kind Support! I'm thrilled you're here. Every week, we’ll explore how empathy, AI, and kindness in customer support can transform experiences—keeping things human even in a world filled with automation.

🔖 Featured Insight

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

This week insight is from the bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People written by Stephen Covey in 1989 (yep that’s before AI and yep, that’s before I was even born!). I first read Covey’s book a few years ago and I fell in love with it right away….because, even if you wouldn’t guess from the title, it rejectes the idea of quick-fix" solutions presents a principle-centered framework for personal and professional effectiveness based on developing one's character.

The book outlines a progressive series of habits all designed to help readers achieve their goals by aligning themselves with universal and timeless principles of fairness, integrity, and human dignity.

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.

- Stephen Covey

As customer support professionals, when we try to practice "seeking first to understand”, we practice empathetic listening. In customer support, this means not only being able to rephrase content (that alone sometime is not even beneficial) but also to connect with the other person on a personal level. For real, no shortcuts here. We really want to feel sad or happy as the other person is feeling. We want to connect to their struggles, be part of their life even if just for that interaction. We want to listen to them because we care about them.

To put, in the (better) words of Roma Sharma:

Only after we connected with the other person we can attempt problem solving.

"When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving."
- Stephen Covey

🤖 AI Spotlight: Ticket Triage

What are AI ticket triage solutions?

AI ticket triage solutions automate the categorization, prioritization, and routing of support tickets, helping thus reducing response times and improving efficiency for customer support teams. These solutions try to do better what we used to do with tagging and routing based on keywords (e.g. every ticket mentioning “privacy” would go to a GDPR queue), workflows and manual tagging.

How These Solutions Work

• AI-Powered Categorization: AI analyzes incoming tickets for keywords, intent, and sentiment, and assignes categories automatically.

• Prioritization: AI flags urgent issues (e.g., system outage, bugs, etc) using sentiment analysis and business impact assessment.

• Intelligent Routing: Tickets are routed to the most suitable agent or queue based on expertise, workload, and historical resolution data.

Some solutions to explore

During the next weeks we’ll explore better these solutions (n8n as mentioned in the past issue, but also others such as Zendesk AI, Freshdesk and few others). This will take a bit of work on my end but stay tuned! 😊

I Was Seduced by Exceptional Customer Service

In this speech, with the promising title “I Was Seduced By Exceptional Customer Service”, John Boccuzzi, Jr explains why great customer service can be the best marketing tool and how it generates profitable long-term businesses. Answering the question “Why do businesses who focus on exceptional customer service do well?” Boccuzzi, Jr says

“[…]these business don’t just survive, they thrive! […] What they all have in common they all focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences each and every day. It’s what keeps the barrier between them and their competitors. Delivering customer experience isn’t just good for the customer, by the way, it’s actually good business and Forrester Research did a study over a five-year period and in 2016 they published this paper and what they found was companies that truly focus on exceptional experiences for customers outperform the leaders, outperform the laggers in customer experience significantly in revenue so it’s not just good for customers, it’s good business”.

🙏 Thank you for reading Kind Support

I really appreciate having you here. Please feel free to reply to this email to share thoughts or recommendations for next issues. Also, I would love to tell your story in the newsletter. Let’s make this about people who helps other people.

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Welcome to the very first issue of Kind Support! I'm thrilled you're here. Every week, we’ll explore how empathy, AI, and kindness in customer support can transform experiences—keeping things human even in a world filled with automation.

A bit about myself. I’m Ettore Trozzi, a passionate Customer Support & Success Leader. My mission is to help teams leave a lasting impact on customers by enriching their experience with empathy, kindness, and humility. During the years, I’ve worked for great companies and startups such as Apple, Too Good To Go and Taxfix. You can follow me on LinkedIn here.

🔖 Featured Insight

The Unsung Heroes of Customer Support

This week, I came across an insightful post from Amir Salihefendic, CEO and Founder of Doist, about the invaluable yet often overlooked work of customer support teams.

“The unsung heroes in many organizations are the customer support teams and engineers who quickly resolve issues.”

Read the full post by Amir Salihefendic here on LinkedIn.

From what I read online (and experienced myself), at Doist, makers of popular productivity tools like Todoist and Twist, customer support central to their entire organization.

On a recent Reddit thread, many Todoist users shared their experience with customer support and what stood out to me is this sentence from user CrispRat:

TL;DR - Todoist customer service made me feel heard and fixed my very minor issue.

Feeling genuinely heard is at the core of exceptional customer support. And it’s something that we need to focus on when interacting with our customers.

(Learn more about Doist’s approach here or explore opportunities here.)

🤖 AI Spotlight: Meet n8n

What is n8n?

n8n (short for “nodemation”) is an open‑source, node‑based workflow automation platform that lets you visually connect 400‑plus apps and services to build powerful automations without heavy coding things yourself. You can self‑host it for full control or use n8n Cloud and start automating in minutes.

Why I’m excited to explore it for customer support (and success)

• Instant ticket triage: With a bit of work you could pipe incoming conversations from Intercom, Zendesk, Help Scout, or even email into n8n; run an LLM node to detect sentiment, urgency, or topic; then auto‑label or route tickets to the right queue.

• Proactive success workflows: Monitor product events (e.g., “payment failed” or “abandon cart”) and trigger personalized check‑ins. The AI writes friendly messages that feel human, not bot‑generated. And then real humans follow up to maintain the conversation human.

Some templates to explore on your own

n8n gives access to templates you can use to start your automations. They’ve a bunch under Support, feel free to explore them on your own and let me know which one you like and why. Explore them here.

Curious about n8n? I’ll share a step‑by‑step setup for ticket triage in the next issue. Meanwhile, hit reply and tell me about the support tasks you’d love to automate (and the one you think should be handled only by humans)!

🧠 Thought for the Week

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." — Maya Angelou

I love what we can do with AI to build better customer support experiences. If we’ve the right tools we can really help and empower customers. However, I believe the real differentiator in the future (as everyone will have access to GenAI tools) is to bring empathy and kindness in the conversation with real humans. Those interactions will make people really feel heard, as in the example of Todoist.

TL;DR Teams that will invest in the human side will really create memorable interactions (and bring revenue).

🏎️ From Tractors to Supercars: Lamborghini’s Lesson in Customer Support

Ferruccio Lamborghini was the entrepreneur who founded the car company that bears his name. Long before he turned to sports-car manufacturing, the Italian businessman made his fortune building tractors. In 1948, in the town of Cento, he launched Lamborghini Trattori, a venture successful enough to let him indulge his love of high-performance automobiles. Legend has it that he grew frustrated when he discovered the pricey clutch in one of his Ferraris was the same model used in his tractors. Convinced he could do better, he resolved to build superior cars himself.

Lamborghini’s vision, however, extended beyond engineering. He also obsessed over customer support: what would happen if an owner in Spain or England encountered a mechanical problem? In an interview, he described how this focus on after-sales service became a cornerstone of the Lamborghini brand.

Make sure to select subtitles if you don’t speak Italian.

🙏 Thank you for reading Kind Support

I really appreciate having you here. Please feel free to reply to this email to share thoughts or recommendations for next issues. Also, I would love to tell your story in the newsletter. Let’s make this about people who helps other people.

Subscribe now