The 4 Bucket System for Support
The support queue is endless. If it's exhausting you today but you have no queue-colleague to commiserate with, do not despair.
All you need to do is find a parent of several young children and ask them how their clothes basket is going. They will understand you immediately, and deeply. Laundry for a young family swings between massive piles of dirty clothes needing washing and massive piles of clean clothes to be put away.
In both cases, a bit of organization can reduce the mental effort. Breaking that giant mass into smaller piles that can be tackled separately (perhaps by complaining children) makes it easier to move forward. Separate your urgent support from your less critical so you always have the support equivalent of clean underpants ready to go.
Is there a support equivalent of searching for just one decent pair of adult-sized socks amongst the 300 mismatched socks your kids somehow get through in a week? Probably, but I have too much actual washing to deal with to think of one now. I leave that as an exercise for you, dear reader.
Sorting things into buckets is a basic tool of organization. Your help desk probably has buckets in the form of tags and categories you can apply to any conversation. It’s worth spending time on.
But you can bucket-sort other things too. As we’re all in this moment of artificial intelligence integration, I suggest we bucket-sort our own jobs as a way of figuring out where to focus. To do that, we’ll need 4 buckets, which I have prepared earlier.
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The 4 Bucket Support Job Sorting System ™*
Imagine 4 brightly colored beach buckets (or 4 well-worn industrial cleaning buckets, depending on your vibe). Give your metaphorical buckets these catchy names:
"Leave this to me please, no AI help needed"
"I still want to own this, but I could use some technological help"
"Sure, let the AI have a go, but I'll want to review its work"
"I'd happily let AI automate this entirely"
Set those up on your mental carpet by your desk, and then as you do your work, assign each type of work to one of the buckets. For example:
Choosing the right category for this incoming support ticket
Summarizing a long, ongoing support thread
Responding to an upset customer after an outage
Telling someone why a product has been removed
Working through a pricing calculation
Explaining how third party delivery providers work
Managing secure account access
Updating customer records
Processing standard refunds
Plus the uncountable other things support teams handle at different companies and different stages. There is no wrong answer, it's just a way to interrogate your own feelings.
The future of customer support work will likely involve artificial intelligence and machine learning in active combination with human skill.
How exactly will those things be combined? If we leave the decision to the executives and leaders without direct support experience, they will certainly make different choices than the people actively working in the queues would.
A support team who have thoughtfully considered AI tools and have a prioritized list of how they could be applied is in a much stronger position than a team who reflexively push back against all AI, or one which has no considered input to offer.
How would you ideally bucket your own work? If you do the work now, you’ll be ready when you're asked that question by someone who could otherwise choose your buckets for you.
* Totally Made-up
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.
