Charlotte Ward •

311: Stop Escalating And Start Routing; with Alex Batchelor

About this episode

“Escalate to engineering” sounds normal, but it quietly shapes how your whole company treats support. We challenge that default and replace it with a more accurate model: routing work to the right skill set, while keeping escalation for the moments that truly need higher priority and attention. Along the way, we explore how small language choices change ownership, expectations, and trust between customer support and engineering teams.

Alex Batchelor, founder and CEO of Pebble, shares what happens when support gets the same technical context engineers use: logs, error monitoring, product analytics, documentation, and code-level clues. We talk about turning customer signals into product improvements without getting trapped at either extreme of the spectrum: raw data with no story, or vivid anecdotes with no proof. The goal is practical support operations that reduce context switching, shorten time-to-resolution, and create feedback loops engineering can actually act on.

We also dig into proactive support and the future of AI in customer support. If your systems can detect an integration token expiring or a recurring error before a customer files a ticket, you can reach out first and create a genuinely delightful customer experience. And as automation handles the basics, we look at where humans add the most value: building the support system, solving the hardest technical tickets, and delivering consultative support that feels closer to a partnership than a transaction.

If you want tighter engineering collaboration, cleaner ticket routing, and a more scalable technical support model, listen now. Subscribe, share this with a support or engineering leader, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Alex Batchelor

Transcript

Charlotte Ward: 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode 311 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today Alex Batchelor talks about how support can solve more by partnering with engineering. Alex, thank you so much for joining me today for the first time. It's lovely to see you. Lovely to see you too, Charlotte. Now, uh, you haven't been on the podcast before, and indeed, I think is this your first podcast? It's actually my second podcast. Your second, so you've done one since we lined this up. Oh my goodness, I should have been faster. I'm so sorry. Um, I'm I'm glad to have caught you now, a seasons podcast seasoned podcast guest. Season podcast. I'm basically famous now. Basically famous. Uh love it. Um for for the people who don't know you through your fame, um, would you please would you please introduce yourself? Tell us who you are, what you're doing.

Alex Batchelor: 1:15

Yes. Um, so uh I'm Alex Batchelor. I am the founder and CEO of Pebble. Pebble is a technical support resolution platform. We integrate with a whole bunch of help desks and desk intercom. Um, you seem to be Help Scout, Salesforce, and we help support folks take on um more technical issues, and we give them the context and kind of engineering information um to be able to very quickly debug and understand technical issues that customers are running into. And um, we're also very into using our own product for our own support. So um I'm kind of hands-on doing support every day with our customers and using our product to do it. So kind of half CEO hat, half support leader hat.

Charlotte Ward: 2:13

That's all all the best, uh all the best support leaders, I think, have uh got deeply into the product at some point as well or other. Um whether it's through doing support, like not necessarily actually building, but like spending a lot of time in the product or uh, you know, building it. Like at some point you have to, I think, just kind of get in there and understand things. Um eno

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