“We’re actively investigating, and you’ll have an update within the hour.”
I’ve said some version of that sentence more times than I can count. Sometimes the update came within the hour. Sometimes the hour became a day. Sometimes I said the exact same sentence again the next morning, to the same person, on the same account, still angry, still waiting.
A LinkedIn post has been making the rounds calling CSAs liars. Not in a joking way. It lists the things we say while we’re still investigating: “we’re looking into it,” “I don’t have an update yet but I’m on it,” “we take this seriously.” The post argues we say things we can’t actually back up, and it names that plainly: lying.
It struck a nerve. CSAs are agreeing with it in the comments. Other CSAs are pushing back, arguing about whether this is lying, or something else that doesn’t have a good name yet.
I’ve told those exact sentences. I know precisely which ones the post means. And I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to figure out if I was lying, or if something else was going on.
Here’s what’s actually happening behind that sentence.
Engineering ships a release. They know exactly what they built and exactly what they tested. What they don’t know is what it touches downstream, because they’re already heads-down on the next release. Support picks up a ticket an hour later with no idea a release even went out. They’re triaging a symptom with no context for what just changed underneath it. Neither team is doing anything wrong. They’re both doing their job well, inside their own silo, with the information available to them.
The CSA sits in the middle of that gap, on the phone, with the one person who doesn’t care whose silo this is. The customer just wants to know what happened to their data, their workflow, their weekend.
So the CSA says the sentence. Not because it’s false. Because it’s the only honest thing available: we don’t know yet, and we’re looking. The lie, if there is one, isn’t in the sentence. It’s in the confidence the sentence implies, confidence the CSA doesn’t actually have, because nobody handed it to them.
That’s not a lie. It’s a placeholder standing in for information that doesn’t exist yet.
A lie is something you know isn’t true when you say it. A placeholder is something you believe is true, said with the full intention of making it true, spoken by someone who has no way to verify it in the moment. The CSA isn’t hiding anything. The CSA doesn’t have anything to hide, because nobody has told them what’s actually going on either.
But here’s the part that makes the LinkedIn post worth taking seriously instead of dismissing: placeholders said enough times, on enough calls, start to sound like lies whether or not they are. Trust doesn’t check your intentions. It checks your track record. And a CSA’s track record is only as good as the information they’re handed, shift after shift, ticket after ticket.
Multiply this by every release, every account, every shift change, and you start to see the real shape of the problem.
Engineers clock out having shipped their part cleanly. Support hands off a ticket at the end of a shift, still unresolved. The customer doesn’t experience any of those handoffs. They experience one continuous problem with the CSA’s name attached to it, because the CSA is the only person who was there for all of it. The customer doesn’t care that three teams touched this. They care that one person keeps telling them the same almost-answer.
The gap isn’t a people problem. It’s a visibility problem. Nobody on any team is refusing to share what they know. Nobody knows enough, fast enough, to share it. The CSA is asked to be honest with the customer using information the company hasn’t assembled yet.
This is the exact gap we started Kosmos to close. When something breaks, the real question is never “what does support think happened” or “what did engineering just ship.” It’s whether those two things are the same event. We call that a correlation cluster: the release, the ticket spike, the affected accounts, connected instead of scattered across three tools and two teams. When enough signals line up, it becomes a risk event, something the CSA can actually name to a customer instead of gesturing at.
That doesn’t make the wait disappear. Investigations still take the time they take. But it changes what the CSA has to say while they wait. “We found the release that’s connected to this” is a different sentence than “we’re looking into it.” One is a placeholder. The other is a fact, even if the fix isn’t ready yet.
CSAs shouldn’t have to choose between reassuring a customer and telling them the truth. They shouldn’t have to hold that tension alone, shift after shift, call after call. The little truths were never the problem. The silence behind them was.
Teams whose CSAs are stuck repeating placeholders through every escalation are exactly who we built this for.
We offer a complimentary Investigation Cost Audit: forty-five minutes, a structured look across five dimensions of how your teams investigate and communicate during escalations. You leave with a scorecard on what those placeholders are actually costing you, in time, in trust, and in how often the same issue comes back around.