Kind Support — Issue #2
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood - AI Customer Support Ticket Triage
Welcome Note 📝
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.