A lot has changed since the start of the year and not just job titles and cities. Charlotte Ward sits down with returning guest Alec Maloney to take stock of what is actually happening inside modern customer support teams as AI, automation, and faster tooling collide with the day-to-day reality of customers, tickets, and people management.
We get practical about the new build vs buy trade-offs for AI in customer service. Alec shares what it looks like to evaluate vendor platforms and aim to shift a meaningful chunk of ticket volume to AI-assisted chat and email, while Charlotte explains why her instinct is often to build custom systems that fit the exact workflow. Along the way we talk Zendesk reporting, scripts generated with AI, and why “solve the problem in front of you” has become a useful operating principle for support operations and CX leadership.
Then we zoom out to the bigger changes: blurred boundaries between support, ops, and adjacent functions, the need for centralised knowledge (Notion, Confluence, knowledge bases) to make AI effective, and the weird new shape of career progression. Title compression and flatter orgs mean growth can feel like more scope and more influence rather than a clean promotion, which raises real questions about sustainability, delegation, and what different team members actually want from their careers.
If you lead customer support, CX, or support ops and you are trying to make AI useful without losing the human layer, this conversation will give you language, examples, and a few sharp edges to think about. Subscribe, share this with a fellow support leader, and leave a review with the one change you are seeing most in your own team.