You're on a role

Many years ago (despite what the date at the top of the article says) I wrote about the 5 types of people on your support team. It was not an exhaustive list, even then, but 5 of the common types¹. Here’s a reminder:

• The Metronome – even on busy, stressful days they’ll calmly work the queue
• The Fixer – your problem solving detective for the toughest cases
• The Firefighter – when things are on fire, they’re the person you want taking charge
• The Diplomat – providing clarity, empathy, and patience for difficult or confused customers
• The Queue Crusher – takes helpfully big bites out of any backlogged queue

Re-reading it today, all of those 5 are still important roles. Not necessarily 5 different people, but varied modes of queue work which people according to their skills and the needs of the moment.

Today it is those “needs of the moment” that are changing. Customer support teams are being reshaped by generative AI tools and by the same economic forces that have shuffled the makeup of whole companies and industries. New modes of support work will arise to suit new teams.

In a video about a definitely real support team  onboarding in 2028 I anticipated a self-service first support experience, where most customer service requests, most of the time, start through an AI-mediated self-service experience.

So if you were to add a couple of new types of people to my list, what would you add? Perhaps The AI-Wrangler, somebody who is responsible for feeding and tuning the AI tools that are answering some subset of your customers.

Or maybe you’d add The Monitor, to do triage and provide oversight and assistance to both humans and bots as they work the queue. The Documentarian, who collects, creates, and maintains the vital sources of information for AI and humans alike, is a must.

What do you think, friend? Are there new types on your team already? Or is there a role you are hoping to create? When things are in flux it can be easier to reshape them to suit your specific needs, so now is the time to think about it. Tell me who you'd add to the list.

¹ And not in the "Every person on earth fits into one of these X specific types" corporate astrology ways. It's more a categorization of the work and the different skills that apply to those categories.