Customer Support & Sales Operations

About Customer Support & Sales Operations

The two desks that touch your customers directly, which is why they are the two most often outsourced badly.

A support desk that answers an hour late is worse than no support desk, because it has set an expectation and missed it. A sales desk working from a stale list is worse than an empty pipeline, because it is spending money to annoy people who might have bought later. Both failures are operational rather than human.

What separates the desks that work is unglamorous and entirely writable down: coverage stated in hours rather than in adjectives, an escalation path agreed before the first escalation, a quality score somebody actually reads each month, and a handover that survives a resignation. None of that is a talent question.

The writing here covers ticket triage, live chat, appointment setting, the in-house-versus-outsourced SDR comparison, multichannel handling, and the time-zone arithmetic of running a desk from somewhere else — including the point at which "24-hour coverage" stops being a scheduling problem and becomes a second team.

Where to start

There are 48 pieces below. These are the ones worth opening first.

1. How to Triage Support Tickets

   The one process that decides whether a desk feels fast or slow, almost independently of how many people are on it.

2. Outsourced SDR vs In-House Hiring

   The comparison with the arithmetic attached, if you are weighing the two.

3. Running Handovers Across Time Zones

   Read this before promising anybody round-the-clock cover.