Blaugust
On finding purpose in customer support
I wrote this post as my submission to the August edition of the IndieWeb Carnival, which each month invites folks to write something on their blog based on a topic proposed by a rotating host. August’s carnival topic is “purpose” and the host is Chris Shaw. I am also double dipping and counting this as my first post of Blaugust 2026 - a community celebration of blogging.
For the last 15 years or so my job[^1] has been (more or less) to think about and build the mechanisms to deliver customer support for companies who (more or less) make software on the internet that (more or less) helps other businesses do something more efficiently. In that time I’ve said a lot of things about what the purpose of that labor is. Support as the face of your product. Support as your connection to your customer’s needs. Support as a viable, valuable and under-appreciated career. My understanding of the purpose of the work has shifted and grown alongside me.
The latest evolution of this opinion has less to do with changes in my own view of the work and more to do with changes in the macroeconomic landscape. While the death of support has been confidently decried many times in the past, I believe a time of transformation is really at hand - even if there is life still in the profession. I’m certainly not the first to say that AI - and more precisely LLMs - are dramatically changing both the support customers receive and the daily lives of the people giving it. At no time in the past has it been so easy for a company to give somewhat acceptable answers at such low costs and, debatably, quality.