The team that was shrinking while the work grew
A shrinking customer service team facing rising ticket volume — instead of fighting for headcount, we studied the work, automated the repetitive parts, and had the team help build its own tools.
What we started with
A small customer service organization moved under my operations umbrella at exactly the wrong moment: ticket volume was climbing, the work was getting more complex, and attrition had already shrunk the team — with no backfills coming. The default move was obvious: go fight for headcount.
On the floor and in the data
Before asking for people, I studied where the existing hours actually went. I did portions of the work myself to learn it firsthand — and the pattern was hard to miss. A large share of the team's day was repetitive, manual, and highly structured: transferring tickets between systems that didn't talk to each other, and typing out near-identical responses to the same customer situations. This wasn't judgment work. It was routing and repetition wearing a judgment-work costume.
The work
I partnered with our engineering team and dug into agentic AI workflows — not by buying a tool off the shelf, but by automating the specific, structured tasks the diagnostic had surfaced. The overlooked step: I rebalanced the team's labor to create capacity for people to participate in building the automation, so the team shaped its own tools instead of having them dropped on their desks.
The part that applies to your building: when a team is underwater, the first question isn't "how many people do we need?" — it's "where do the hours actually go?" Most operations answer with a hiring req or a software purchase before anyone's studied the work. The study comes first. Sometimes the answer is people. Sometimes it's automation. It's never a guess — and that's fixable too.
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