Charlotte Ward •

305: Measuring Your Support Maturity; with Neal Travis

About this episode

Support teams don’t usually fail because they “don’t care” or “aren’t working hard enough.” They fail because they scale on instinct, accumulate tribal knowledge, and measure whatever is easiest until the whole system starts to wobble. We sit down with Neal Travis, Head of Customer Experience and Operations at AIHR, to talk about measuring support maturity in a way that leads to real decisions, not a prettier dashboard. Neal shares how a small team can support a large customer base by getting ruthless about what support owns and how the work is designed.

We walk through Neal's support maturity framework built around three domains: knowledge, quality, and data and insights. On the knowledge side, we dig into self-service experience, internal knowledge management, and training that prepares the team for what’s coming next, not just onboarding. We also unpack why “supportability” is an outcome when documentation, enablement, and cross-team alignment are strong, and why customers learning changes before support does is always a red flag.

From there we move into quality, separating communication quality (standards, coaching, QA programmes, onboarding for great conversations) from operating quality (channels, capacity, coverage, incident management, and the reality of a messy support tech stack). Finally, we get practical about support metrics and measurement architecture: choosing the right metrics, understanding trade-offs like handle time vs after-call work, building reliable data infrastructure, and turning voice of the customer into action that closes the loop.

If you want a clear picture of where your support function is mature and where it’s fragile, this conversation gives you a map. Subscribe for more, share this with a support leader who’s trying to scale, and leave a review with the one domain you’re working on next.

Neal Travis

Transcript

Charlotte Ward: 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode 305 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Neal Travis to talk about measuring your support maturity. Welcome back, Neil. Neil, lovely to have you back on the show. It's been a little while, but here we are, having a good catch-up. But first, just to catch everyone else up, would you mind introducing yourself for the audience again?

Neal Travis: 0:47

Yeah, of course. And thank you so much for having me back. I think it's uh it's been quite a long while. Um yeah, uh my name is Neal. I uh I'm then currently the head of customer experience and operations at AI HR, it's the Academy to Innovate HR. Um been there about seven years or so. Uh started when there were about eight people. Now we're uh over a hundred. Uh so really gone through the scaling experience and trying to grow our teams and grow our business.

Charlotte Ward: 1:13

So yeah. Awesome. Yeah, welcome back. It has been a while. Um, so um growing teams, growing the business, um, quite a lot of change at uh AIHR um in seven years. Um and a lot of growth. And you'll see what I did there because we're talking about today, we're talking about maturity, aren't we? Um and quite specifically, I guess the stages that all support teams go through, um, some some of them multiple times as we experiment and ratchet back and try something else. But we're talking essentially about support maturity. And you've uh you've had you've done a lot of thinking on this, haven't you? I think it's fair to say.

Neal Travis: 1:54

Yeah, yeah, indeed.

Charlotte Ward: 1:56

Uh so so what what let maybe let's start with what provoked that thinking? Obviously, you've been through quite an evolution at AIHR. Um tell us a little bit about that journey and and sort of some of the thinking that that provoked.

Neal Travis: 2:10

Yeah. Um when I started at AIHR, we were very, very small. And uh I think there it was like, hey, help customers figure out uh

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