The Not-Particularly-Weird Science of Support
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki found that you’re more likely to have belly button lint if you’re male, older, hairy, and have an “innie”.
That discovery earned him a 2002 Ig Nobel Prize, joining the celebrated ranks of the people who determined that dropped toast has an inherent tendency to land butter-side down, and others who found that you get more milk from named cows*.
Experiments are not only for the most serious and world changing applications. You don’t even need to be a scientist to try something and see what happens. There is always more to learn, and in our working lives we all operate under a whole slate of assumptions and perspectives.
We hold beliefs about what works and what does not, why things are the way they are, and what would happen if things were done differently.
Some of those beliefs are well founded, and save a lot of the unnecessary time and hassle of changing a working system. Others were true at one time, but may no longer be accurate. Some may have never been true at all.
What experiments could your team run to test some of those assumptions?
Does responding to people within 40 minutes really improve satisfaction compared to a 70 minute response?
Would staffing up your chat channel more often reduce your email support, or does it create new demand?
Is an hour each week out of the queue to create documentation more or less effective than a full half-day once a month?
Could AI tools help you write more quickly without stripping your personality out?
You don’t need to strictly control every variable. Just have an idea, and find a low-cost, low-risk way to try it. It might work, it might fail. You might learn something you never expected.
Change is inevitable, so you might as well be the person shaping its direction.
* I have yet to find research on the desert travel capabilities of named vs unnamed horses.
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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.
