CommuniZate

CommuniZate CommuniZate helps businesses fix the systems they run on - service management (ESM/ITSM), CRM, and the processes, people, and leadership behind them.

Practical rebuilds that outlast whoever built them. |communicate |relate |innovate |create

Customer Service and Business Process expert - more than a decade of experience leading, teaching, and growing people. Technology, business, customer service, and leadership consultant, specializing in people, process, communication, and procedure. I can fix your home computer and assist with your technolog

y, but my passion is people and improving communication and process in businesses. I enjoy being able to recognize and cultivate the potential in others, to build leaders and teams, and to encourage continual improvement, growth and engagement. At the core of good leadership and procedure is communication, the ability to relate, an innovative approach and a creative mind.

The customer doesn't tell you the process. Your process tells you the process.A customer can tell you what's not working...
08/27/2026

The customer doesn't tell you the process. Your process tells you the process.

A customer can tell you what's not working. They can't tell you who the ticket gets assigned to, what priority it is, or how it moves through your queue. That's not theirs to decide, and letting them decide it is how any customer service operation falls apart.

This may sound harsh, but it isn't. This is gracious, and it's good customer service. If you don't recognize it, you might be living without it.

When a customer says "just send this straight to so-and-so" or "this needs to be highest priority," they aren't wrong to want a fast fix - they just don't have the whole picture. They can't see the other 50+ tickets, the actual severity scale, or why their "urgent" isn't the organization's "urgent".

The only people who can change your process are the people who own it. That's you. That's the team. It is never the customer, because they didn't build it and they can't see all of it.

Handle their issue with everything you've got. Just don't let them redraw the process to do it.

Someone asks a yes or no question in text. I respond with "yes." ...and a complaint goes up the chain about how I was ru...
08/26/2026

Someone asks a yes or no question in text. I respond with "yes." ...and a complaint goes up the chain about how I was rude.

This happens more often than it should, and it took me years to understand why. I say exactly what I mean. I'm honest. I give the whole story up front - no subtext, no hidden ask, no hidden follow-up question I'm secretly hoping you'll answer. Just the information.

In a passive aggressive culture, no one says what they actually mean. "Do you know something about this?" doesn't mean what it says - it means "you should have handled this already and provide me all the information I want without knowing what I'm looking for." Every question carries hidden intent, so people stop listening to the words and start hunting for the real message underneath.

Then someone like me comes along and says the full thing I need to say or ask a question I want the answer to, and they hunt for the hidden intent anyway - because that's the only way they know how to listen. They find subtext that was never there. A direct answer must be a dismissive one. A simple question must be an accusation. So I get called difficult, when all I did was tell the truth without decoration.

One passive aggressive person is a personality. You can work around a personality. What you can't work around is what that person is teaching everyone else - because the people around them aren't just tolerating it. They're learning it. They're learning how to communicate, and worse, they're learning how to listen. They're being trained to assume intent that isn't there and to hear an attack in a plain sentence.

That's the real cost. Not the one difficult communicator. The entire organization slowly losing the ability to take each other at face value.

Most leaders never see it, because passive aggression doesn't look like a problem. It looks like everyone being polite. And if you can't name what it's doing to how your people hear each other, you can't stop it from spreading.

"The customer is always right" is a fallacy.The customer is rarely right. But they are almost always misinformed. They b...
08/25/2026

"The customer is always right" is a fallacy.

The customer is rarely right. But they are almost always misinformed.

They believe they're right, and they've often walked into the interaction already emotional - confused, frustrated, sometimes embarrassed they had to ask at all.

Your job isn't to win the correction. It's to handle the emotion first and the facts second. The moment you make it about proving them wrong, you've lost the interaction (even if you're technically right).

Being right and being helpful are not the same skill. Customer service is the second one.

Customer Service Rules when you work in an environment with Tickets: 3 - Never hide a ticket from a customer.A customer ...
08/21/2026

Customer Service Rules when you work in an environment with Tickets:
3 - Never hide a ticket from a customer.

A customer calls, you help them, and they say "you don't need to make a ticket for this." So you make one quietly anyway, no email, no notification, nothing they'd see.
Don't.

When someone asks you to skip the ticket, it's usually not about process. They are likely embarrassed they had to ask, and they think a ticket means the whole organization now knows they called about something basic. It doesn't. We don't show one customer's tickets to another. But that's the fear underneath it.

"Don't enter a ticket" never means "enter one in secret." It means enter it the exact same way you always do - same process, same notification, same visibility. They get the email, they know it exists - that's the point.

The ticket isn't the thing you hide from the customer. It's the thing you share with them. It's documentation of that one issue, regardless how "basic" - so the next time they call and say "last time you guys...." we know what we did last time.

Speed is a burnout engine.The faster you jump from thing to thing, the more you're running on reaction instead of intent...
08/19/2026

Speed is a burnout engine.

The faster you jump from thing to thing, the more you're running on reaction instead of intention. And reactive work compounds - you get sloppier, edgier, more depleted, and the quality drops right as the pace climbs. Nobody does their best thinking while sprinting between fires.

A "customer first" culture that really means "fast first" doesn't just wear out customers with half-fixes. It wears out the team delivering them. Burned-out people don't give good service. They give quick service, which is not the same thing, and eventually they don't give service at all - they leave.

Or worse - they take it out on the customer who didn't deserve it, because they have been running on an empty tank of service-juice and can't bring themselves to answer that same question one. more. time. Even if it is the first time that customer has asked it.

Protect the pace, and you protect the people. Protect the people, and the service takes care of itself.

I can spot a sales script in about ten seconds, and the moment I do, I'm out.Not because I hate being sold to (I do). Bu...
08/18/2026

I can spot a sales script in about ten seconds, and the moment I do, I'm out.

Not because I hate being sold to (I do). But because I can tell the person on the other end has zero interest in me. They're not listening to help me - they're listening for the gap where they insert the next line.

Scripts have a place. When you're new, they're training wheels, and there's no shame in that. But the goal is to outgrow them. Robotic to conversational. Formalities to an actual human exchange. You should not be dependent on a script to serve a person standing in front of you.

In ITSM tools, "canned responses" are wonderful. But they can also be a detrimental crutch that impacts your customer service.

People can feel the difference between being helped and being processed.

Customer Service Rules if you work in an environment with Tickets:2 - If it's not in the ticket, it didn't happenYou fix...
08/14/2026

Customer Service Rules if you work in an environment with Tickets:
2 - If it's not in the ticket, it didn't happen

You fixed the issue. Great. But if you didn't write down what you did, I can't prove it was done, when, or by who. As far as the record is concerned, nothing happened.
An agent messages me, "hey, this ticket's brutal, did you try X?" I say yeah, do X. They do it, it works, they close the ticket. A month later I'm looking at it asking how it got solved. "I asked you in Teams." That's not documentation, that's a reference to a side conversation you used.

And here's the part so many of my agents have missed - this is designed to protect them.

When a ticket took three days, the notes are what show you were troubleshooting the whole time, not sitting on it. No notes, no defense. You're underselling your own work. I can't fight for you if you don't give me ammunition.

If it's not in the ticket, it didn't happen. Write it down.

Throwing new technology at a bad process results in a bad process with a new interface.I always start with the process o...
08/12/2026

Throwing new technology at a bad process results in a bad process with a new interface.

I always start with the process over the technology. It's how I've improved every organization I've stepped into in weeks instead of months.

I've witnessed so many organizations do the same thing, and they all think they are "different" - they aren't. They never have been:

They force their existing process into a new system, and inside of three years they're blaming the system. The system was fine. The process it was built around was always the problem.

The hard part isn't the process work. It's the people resisting.

People often don't fear change - they are afraid of trading something familiar for something unknown. They fear doing something different than the thing they already know doesn't work.

They fear failure - "this is getting by and things are breaking but if we change it, something else might break and I don't have the capacity to fix something else right now."

They fear feelings of inadequacy - "I was a part of building this process 25 years ago, if I admit it's not working anymore then that's admitting I was wrong - and I don't work as well anymore."

I've had to learn tactics for helping organizations review their processes without ever telling them they have to change. Because the moment it sounds like an accusation, you've lost the room.

One of the things every IT person I've witnessed struggles with is setting expectations up front. If we don't set expect...
08/12/2026

One of the things every IT person I've witnessed struggles with is setting expectations up front. If we don't set expectations, we'll always miss them.

It's why every team I've led has received documented Priorities and Expectations. It's not a policy manual, it's a list of behaviors. A policy manual tells people the rules, it almost never changes what they actually do. So my page skips the rules and lists things I can watch someone do - things no one can argue with:

- Enter a ticket for every issue. No work without one.
- Take ownership of the ticket before you start, not after.
- Waiting on a response? Follow up. Work done? Resolve it.
- Document everything in the ticket - every call, every conversation. If it's not in the ticket, it didn't happen.
- Finish the interaction before you move on. The call isn't over until the ticket is handled.

Don't write off any customer. No matter how you feel, no matter what kind of day you're having.One bad interaction can s...
08/10/2026

Don't write off any customer. No matter how you feel, no matter what kind of day you're having.

One bad interaction can shatter your company's reputation. One good one waters the seeds of growth. Those aren't equal weights. The damage is instant and the growth is slow, which means the person having a rough Friday afternoon on your organization's phones is holding more of the company's reputation than they realize.

That ticket that came in at 4:58pm? The one you want to shoot off quick and clean up tomorrow? That's a customer you just decided doesn't matter as much as your commute. If it's not an urgent issue, it's better to handle it in the morning when you can dedicate time to the response they deserve, and make sure you've read their email completely before responding.

Every interaction matters. Not as a motivational poster - as a literal accounting of risk.

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