Best Practices · Page 2

Best Practices

When Your QA Score Says “Bad Agent”, and It’s Wrong

A dog barks once in the background of an otherwise perfect call. The agent scores zero. A phone transfer drops the first two seconds of a handoff. The receiving agent is dinged for an incomplete greeting. A customer’s real name happens to sound like a profanity. An AI-powered QA system flags the agent for inappropriate…

Neal Travis · 21 Jul 2026

Artificial Intelligence

How AI Is Changing Support Engineering Roles

Many of us keep hearing that AI is coming for our jobs. Support engineers are no exception. But the reality on the ground can look quite different. Some teams are using AI every day to streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and surface insights faster. Others have seen little change in how they operate over the…

Maryna Paryvai · 14 Jul 2026

Best Practices

The Problem With Three Knocks (and What Great Support Teams Do Instead)

In customer support, first touch is always important. But follow-up often gets underestimated when teams talk about what creates a strong customer experience. At small volumes, the processes around follow-up are trivial. The agent sends the key message, the customer replies, and the issue closes. At tens of thousands of tickets a month, that model…

Mark Sherwood · 7 Jul 2026

Best Practices

Is Your QA Scorecard Measuring Quality or Just Script Compliance?

There’s a Reddit thread on r/callcentres that every support leader should read. An agent describes waking up on rollover day, the morning QA scores reset, excited and confident. They’d followed the call flow perfectly on every new booking call they knew would be reviewed. But QA pulled different calls. The ones where, by their own…

Neal Travis · 30 Jun 2026

Best Practices

If Not Empathy, Why Empathy Shaped?

Nearly every QA rubric in Customer Support has a criterion version of it: “agent demonstrated empathy”. Sometimes it gets a point scale. Sometimes a checkbox. Occasionally a grading guide that says something like “score 3 if the agent showed genuine care for the customer’s situation”, as if genuine is something that means the same every…

Ines van Dijk · 23 Jun 2026

Best Practices

What Should Customer Service QA Actually Measure?

One QA team described reading 8,000 to 9,000 tickets per month by hand, and then moving to AI that runs quality assurance on 100% of tickets, freeing those ten reviewers to do other work entirely. A huge improvement in coverage. That also quietly raises the stakes on a question most teams never actually settled: what…

Nouran Smogluk · 16 Jun 2026