A hundred tickets a day, and keeping the quality score at 100
This year I've worked in operations at Assurant: around a hundred customer tickets a day, most of them over calls, everything logged in the CRM, all of it audited. Here is what the volume has taught me.
When you first see a queue of a hundred tickets, the instinct is to go faster. That is the wrong instinct. Volume is not a sprint you win by typing quicker. It is a rhythm, and the rhythm only holds if every ticket you touch is actually finished when you leave it.
Read the whole ticket before you speak
Most bad resolutions I have seen, including my own early ones, come from answering the first sentence of a ticket. The customer's real problem is usually in the third line, or in the history from last month that nobody scrolled to. Thirty seconds of reading saves a ten-minute call and a reopened ticket.
Close the loop or don't close the ticket
A ticket is not resolved when I have done the thing. It is resolved when the customer knows what was done and what happens next. Anything less comes back as two tickets: the original one, reopened, and a new one that starts with "I was told this was fixed". Closing the loop is one sentence at the end of the call. It is the cheapest quality control there is.
Escalate early, and hand over complete
Some tickets are not mine to solve. They belong with customer success or with support, and the mistake is either holding them too long or passing them on half-explained. My handover note has three things in it: what I tried, what the customer was told, and what the customer now expects. Handoffs are where quality quietly dies in most operations teams, because the person receiving the ticket starts from zero and the customer has to repeat themselves. A complete note makes the next person faster than I was.
The auditor is the customer's proxy
My interactions are audited, and the score has held at 100% from the day I joined. I do not think about that score as a grade on me. The auditor is someone who was not on the call, reading the record and asking whether the customer got what they needed. That is exactly what the customer would ask if they could see the notes. Writing every ticket as if the customer will read it later turns out to be the whole technique.
Volume is a discipline, not a talent
None of this is clever. It is the same five habits repeated a hundred times a day: read fully, resolve fully, tell the customer, hand over completely, write it down properly. The job of an operations team is to make those habits boring and automatic, so the attention is left for the one ticket in fifty that is out of the ordinary.
I think this is why operations and customer success are the same job at different distances from the customer. Ops is what the customer experiences without seeing. Success is what they experience face to face. Both fail at the same place, which is the handoff, and both are fixed by the same thing, which is finishing what you start.
Written by Mohammed Roshan, who has worked in operations at Assurant and on the bench at a diagnostics lab. Email or LinkedIn.
If this is the kind of thinking your team needs, the CV is one page.