Two weeks ago I wrote that I was going to Dreamforce to count. I had one question, about the day a team knew why something broke. I was going to ask it, stop talking, and write down what I heard.
I did not count anything.
I never got to my question. Most conversations went to two other questions first. We stayed there.
People had seen what we are building. They asked two things.
How does this work. Where is the value.
The first one was about AI. Someone from a large GSI wanted a model name. I gave an answer. They said it made sense. They moved on.
The second one is where we stayed. The answer that worked was not about AI. It was about the frontline team.
The frontline team is whoever hears it from the customer first. Support and CX at a software company. The IT department at a business that runs on software.
The frontline team has the context. They have the customer’s words. They know which accounts. They know when it started.
They have no say in what happens next. They write it up and toss it over to engineering. Then they wait. The customer waits with them.
Engineering gets a ticket in Jira. The ticket is not the customer’s words. It is someone’s summary of them. Engineering opens Salesforce and reads the case again. They build the context the frontline team already had.
That is the investigation cost. The context was in the building the whole time. It was with the people who had no say.
This is where the conversations changed. I heard the same sentence more than once.
I get it now. Our customers get a response faster.
Nobody said that after the model answer. They said it after I described their frontline team tossing a case over to engineering and waiting.
Nobody argued with the description.
I have been writing about investigation cost for months. At Dreamforce I watched it make sense to people across a table.
I do not have the count. It does not matter yet. People recognized their frontline team before anyone asked for a number.
I still want the number.
Teams where the frontline team has the context and no say in what happens next are exactly who we’re thinking about.
If that’s your team, we offer a complimentary Investigation Cost Audit. Forty-five minutes. Structured diagnostic across five dimensions. You leave with a scorecard that quantifies what the investigation is actually costing you: in time, in recurrence, in the hours your frontline team spends waiting on an answer they had the context for.