Why I Still Answer Support Tickets Every Friday as CEO

Every Friday from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m., I sit in our support queue and answer tickets. I have done this since we had six customers, and I still do it now that we have over 150 warehouses using our software. Our support team politely tolerates it. Our board thinks it is a nice gesture. I think it is the most important part of my job.

People ask me why the CEO of a forty-person company is resetting barcode scanner settings. Here is my honest answer.

Dashboards hide the texture

I receive plenty of reports. Ticket volume, response time, customer satisfaction scores. They are useful and I read them. But they are averages, and averages hide the specific moments that make customers love or hate you.

A report will tell me that tickets about label printing went up 12 percent this month. A Friday in the queue will tell me that a night-shift supervisor in Breda spent forty minutes trying to print one pallet label at 3 a.m. while a truck driver waited in the yard. Those are very different pieces of information, and only one of them makes me want to fix the problem immediately.

It keeps my promises honest

When I am talking to investors or prospects, it is very easy to describe our product as better than it is. Not lying exactly, just describing the version in my head. A Friday in the queue brings me back to reality quickly. Last month I answered seven tickets about a single import feature that I had described in a sales call two days earlier as "very robust."

I called that prospect back the following Monday and gave a more accurate description. They signed anyway, and I think they trusted us more for it.

The team sees what I care about

I did not expect this, but my Fridays changed how the rest of the company treats support. Engineers started joining for an hour now and then. Our product manager began reading the Friday log I share afterwards. Support stopped being the department that receives problems and started being the department that knows the most about our customers.

How I keep it from being a gimmick

There are a few rules I set for myself so that this is real work and not theatre.

• I take tickets in order, like everyone else. No cherry-picking easy or interesting ones.
• I follow the same response guidelines as the team. If I write something sloppy, I get feedback.
• I do not fix problems by asking engineers for special favors. If I find a bug, it goes into the normal process.
• I write a short summary afterwards with the three things that surprised me most.

What it costs

Four hours is ten percent of my working week. There are weeks when it feels impossible, usually when fundraising or hiring is intense. On those weeks I cut it to two hours, but I never skip it entirely. The one time I skipped three Fridays in a row, I made a pricing decision that our support team could have told me was a bad idea in five minutes.

I am not a great support agent. My average handling time is noticeably worse than the team's. But I have never left a Friday shift without learning something I could not have learned anywhere else.