You are so right with all of this! Many people view Support as a *cost* and try to "reduce Support calls." But when you view those customer interactions as chances to delight customers - and hey, maybe even point out other relevant features, products, or services that would really make their life easier - then those Support calls are actually golden opportunities for building rapport, trust, and more sales.

How much time and effort do product managers and design teams put into surveys and interviews to get customer feedback? How often do sales reps have to call their customers just to check in? Yet, all the while, customers are literally calling us to tell us about their use cases and pain points!!

I've worked in support for decades AND I'm an AI developer. There is so much potential to use AI technologies to improve customer support processes... But instead leaders want to just replace humans with chatbots. And those hair-brained projects suck all the oxygen out of the room for other, more useful solutions.