Nora A.J. watches the blue dot on the Slack screen pulse with a rhythmic, almost mocking persistence. It is 10:15 in the morning. Outside the window of the 15th-floor office, the city hums with a mechanical indifference that matches the mood inside the meeting room. Around the oak table, 5 executives sit with their laptops open, shields against the vulnerability of eye contact. The support manager, a woman whose caffeine intake has clearly reached critical levels, is reading from a printout. She isn’t reading successes. She is reading a litany of 45 distinct ways the company has failed its users in the last 25 hours. The categories are familiar: ‘Verification Lag,’ ‘Bonus Ghosting,’ and the perennial favorite, ‘System Timeout During Peak.’ As she speaks, the marketing lead looks at his fingernails, and the head of product begins a very intense relationship with a loose thread on his sweater. They recognize the fingerprints. They know these complaints are the direct children of the ‘quick fix’ deployed 5 days ago.

I realized recently that I have been pronouncing the word ‘epitome’ as ‘epi-tome’ (rhyming with ‘home’) in my head for the better part of 35 years. It was a private embarrassment that surfaced during a dinner party where the silence that followed my mistake lasted exactly 5 seconds too long. That realization-that you can be confidently wrong about a foundational piece of information for decades-is how many product teams operate. They are certain their ‘streamlined’ flow is the epitome of design, while the support team is drowning in 855 tickets a day explaining to users how to find the ‘hidden’ exit button. We build these elegant facades and then act surprised when the people living inside them start screaming because the plumbing doesn’t work. Nora A.J., in her role as an emoji localization specialist, often points out that the ‘grimacing face’ emoji 😬 has seen a 125 percent increase in internal use among support staff. It is the mascot of the modern agent: the face you make when you know the customer is right, but the policy is immovable.

The Toxic Loop of ‘Yes, and’

This creates a toxic loop of ‘yes, and’ aikido. In improv, ‘yes, and’ is a tool for creation. In corporate support, it becomes a survival mechanism. ‘Yes, I see that your funds are stuck in limbo, and I’m going to personally monitor this for the next 45 minutes.’ It sounds like a benefit. It’s framed as high-touch service. But in reality, it’s a limitation masquerading as a feature. The agent is forced to perform a theatrical version of ‘caring’ to compensate for a system that was designed to be uncaring. If the system worked, the agent wouldn’t need to ‘personally monitor’ anything. The irony is that the more empathetic the support agent is, the less pressure there is on the product team to fix the actual leak. The empathy acts as a sealant. It’s a temporary patch on a 5-inch hole in the hull of the ship.

Consider the way a platform like U9play approaches the concept of responsiveness. When a business actually listens to the friction points instead of just hiring 25 more people to say ‘we’re sorry’ in different languages, the entire energy of the brand shifts. It moves from defensive to proactive. Most businesses, however, prefer the defensive crouch. They see support as a cost center, a necessary evil that exists to mop up the spills. They don’t realize the mop is getting heavier and the floor is getting more slippery. If you have 55 agents and each of them spends 5 minutes per hour apologizing for the same bug, you aren’t just losing 275 minutes of productivity. You are losing the trust of your employees. You are telling them that their role is to be a human shield, not a problem solver.

A Collision of Worlds

Nora A.J. tells a story about a specific localization project for a client in 2015. They wanted to use the ‘thumbs up’ emoji for every successful transaction. She had to explain that in certain regions, that gesture isn’t a ‘job well done’; it’s an insult. It’s a classic case of assuming a universal language where none exists. Product decisions are often made in that same vacuum. A developer in a quiet office thinks a 15-step verification process is ‘secure.’ A marketing manager thinks a 5-part pop-up sequence is ‘engaging.’ Meanwhile, the support agent in a noisy cubicle has to explain to a 65-year-old grandmother why she can’t access her account because she didn’t click the ‘fire hydrant’ fast enough in a Captcha. It’s a collision of worlds where the person at the point of impact is always the one with the least power to change the map.

The Cost of the ‘Unfixed’ Incident

The Goal: Unnecessary Support

I used to think that the goal of a great company was to have the best support. I was wrong. I’ve realized that for 25 years, I was valuing the cure over the prevention. The goal of a truly great company is to make support unnecessary for 95 percent of the common journey. This doesn’t mean hiding the contact button-that’s a different kind of sin. It means treating every support ticket as a bug report for the entire organization. If 15 people ask the same question, the answer shouldn’t be a better macro; it should be a change in the product that makes the question obsolete. But that requires a level of cross-departmental humility that is rare in the wild. It requires the product lead to say, ‘My design caused 125 hours of unnecessary emotional labor this week. I will fix it.’ Instead, we get a new ‘Empathy Training’ seminar for the support staff, as if the problem is their tone and not the fact that the product is on fire.

Nora A.J. recently pointed out that even the ‘sparkle’ emoji ✨ has been co-opted. Originally meant to show beauty or magic, it’s now often used to highlight the ‘newness’ of a feature that nobody asked for, while the foundational 5-year-old bugs remain unaddressed. It’s a bit of ‘polishing the brass on the Titanic’ logic. We add the sparkles to the header while the hull is taking on water at a rate of 15 gallons per second. The support team is the one with the buckets, desperately throwing water back into the ocean while the band plays a jaunty tune about ‘innovation.’

From Complaint to Intelligence

If we want to fix this, we have to stop treating support as the ‘complaint department’ and start treating it as the ‘intelligence department.’ They are the only people in the building who truly know what the customers are going through. They have the data, but more importantly, they have the stories. They have the 5-page emails from users who are crying because they can’t pay their bills due to a system glitch. They have the transcripts of 45-minute calls where the user just wanted to feel heard. These aren’t ‘tickets’ to be closed. These are signals. In a healthy organization, the support manager doesn’t just read the top complaints at the stand-up; they have the power to halt a release if the ‘apology debt’ becomes too high.

Beyond the Apology

We need to move away from the ‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience’ script. It is the most hollow phrase in the English language. It’s a verbal shrug. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a 5-cent tip. Instead of being sorry, we should be curious. We should be angry on behalf of the user. We should be tired of the same 15 mistakes. When we stop apologizing and start iterating based on the pain points, we finally treat the customer-and the support agent-with the dignity they deserve. Until then, we are just running a very expensive, very loud, and very sad apology factory. How many more ‘sorries’ can your team afford to give before they run out of the currency of care? The 5-o’clock bell is ringing, and the queue is still 115 deep. Tomorrow will be the same, unless we decide that a ‘closed’ ticket is not the same thing as a solved problem.