Welcome to the very first edition of the In The Queue, which is just Phone Screen & #chatter reskinned and rolled into one! Instead of separating these two projects which are just about two sides of the same coin, it makes more sense for me to compile them in one newsletter. It’s also easier and will help me stay more consistent!

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This Week: This issue is focused on a conversation I had with Colin Flanigan and Jenny Chudy a few weeks ago about the system bloat we’ve been feeling at work (and at home).

My Big Take Away: Communication isn’t a waste of time, it helps us work in less complicated systems.

0:00 Growing Up Between Different Realities
1:00 The Pernicious Impulse of Over-Engineering
3:07 Opinionated Software vs. Sandboxes
8:33 Technical Debt and Platform Infrastructure
14:33 The Customer Isn't Always King
22:10 The Tangible Cost of Complexity
31:57 Making Bets Instead of Guarantees
39:53 Transparency as the Antidote to Complexity

If you prefer an audio platform, we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in to your podcasts.

Connect with Colin & Jenny on LinkedIn & the ElevateCX Community!

I rarely hear people talk about the over-complication of systems outside of support teams. What begins as well-intentioned solutions often snowballs into complex, unwieldy structures that create more problems than they solve. We see it in the products we support and the tools we use to do our work, a domino effect leading to frustrating customer experiences.

We spend most of our day in our help desk platforms. We’d love for them to be simple, straightforward tools, but they’ve become more complex over time to remain relevant to as many industries and specializations as possible. Hate it, tbh. Zendesk, the most guilty imo, has spent a decade acquiring companies to remain competitive, but the features they acquire never play well with each other.

It’s not just frustrating - there’s a real cost. Front line teams, often understaffed and under-resourced compared to other departments, are forced to handle the burden of training agents who often have no experience to understand these complicated systems, and maintaining documentation with little to no cross-functional communication. The emotional strain grows as support teams find themselves constantly falling behind, trying to keep up with ever-changing, more complex systems while still serving customer needs. It would be a lie to say we don’t often feel some kind of resentment toward our product partners when this happens.

The irony is that a lot of this complexity comes from efforts to "guarantee" certain outcomes or behaviors. We create elaborate processes and systems to ensure consistency and predictability, when what we really need are experienced professionals empowered to make good decisions in these constantly changing environments. We all agreed,

Instead of hiring people who can think critically and communicate effectively with customers, we’re often boxed into building rigid systems designed to enforce specific behaviors - creating friction and frustration for everyone involved.

All of this complexity eventually leads to cross-functional teams losing sight of their overall goals. Support wants to focus on helping customers succeed with the product, while product and engineering teams may prioritize developing new features that make the system even more complex. Without clear communication and strong cross-functional relationships, these conflicting priorities can lead to a cycle where complexity increases over time.

Communication, probably. When everyone understands why certain decisions are made and how they impact others, it becomes easier to identify and eliminate unnecessary complications. Better planning would probably help, too. It’s impossible to anticipate every challenge, but taking time to consider the implications of new features or processes before implementation can prevent a ton problems before they start. Finally, simplification. Sometimes, the only way forward is to "nuke it and start over" - to recognize when a system has become too unwieldy and rebuild from the ground up with simplicity in mind.

For support teams navigating these challenges, it's crucial to advocate for simpler solutions and clearer communication. By highlighting the real costs of complexity—both to the team and to customers—support professionals can help their organizations recognize when it's time to step back and reconsider their approach. After all, the most elegant solution is rarely the most complex one.

It’s not lost on me that all of these things are easier said than done, but they’re places to start. Have the conversations with your cross-functional partners, build the relationships, work on staying on the same page. Measure that and see how positive that outcome is in the end.

Have a topic you want to chat about? Let me know!

Have something challenge you want to bounce off of the CX leadership sounding board? Ask here and I’ll share the answers in the next Queue & A.