26 Support Tips For 2026
It's 2026! Or it was, when I wrote this. I don't know what year it is for you, and this website has no comments section, so I suppose I'll never know. In any case, my point is that it is newly 2026 for me. So here are 26 one-line support tips grouped by theme but not ordered by importance. Use any of them you find helpful, skip the rest. And if it's 2049 for you, I guess just be careful of Blade Runners.
Back to basics
1. Even if you can’t solve the problem, you can listen well and acknowledge it.
2. Make yourself a list of all the questions before you start answering.
3. Set up a triage process to identify the most urgent items in the queue.
4. Scan your queue for repeated issues to catch new fires early.
5. If you don’t know an answer, follow the issue so you learn when someone else resolves it.
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Writing
6. Your customers should not have to know your internal jargon. Keep it plain.
7. Answer their direct question first; then answer the question they probably should have asked.
8. A “correct” answer can be written in different ways for different customers.
9. Use context clues to figure out how much technical detail is useful.
10. Read your answer out loud before you send it, you’ll hear where it could be better.
Self-service
11. An AI chatbot is just a more complicated form of self-service. Its success should be judged in the same way.
12. Self-service is useless if people can’t find it. Make it accessible from anywhere people look for help.
13. Incorrect help documents are worse than no help documents.
14. Make it easy for your support folks to report missing or outdated help docs.
15. Promote your self-service options in your support replies—but only after you’ve helped them.
Management
16. 1:1 meetings should be primarily for the benefit of your direct reports. It’s their time.
17. Budget out-of-queue time, and defend it, before people burn out.
18. Career growth in support doesn’t have to be becoming a people manager.
19. If you can clearly define what success looks like in your team, hiring is much easier.
20. Once you set a metric, you shape how people work. Be careful.
AI
21. Keep an open mind; there's more to AI than generating text.
22. Use AI to bring your base level of quality up, not to hold your best folks down.
23. Quality assurance is just as important for AI as it is for human support.
24. Consider an AI Support Operations role or focus area on your team this year.
25. Automate the tedious parts, give your people more time to be people.
And here is your final tip:
Keep it simple. All we're really trying to do is be helpful to our customers, but sometimes we make it so complicated for ourselves.
Mathew Patterson
After running a support team for years, Mat joined Help Scout, where he helps people deliver better online customer support. Subscribe to The Supportive Newsletter or find him on LinkedIn.
