Q: Can you give us an overview of Tavolo Consulting and the types of companies you typically work with?
Jordan: Tavolo Consulting is really geared towards early to mid-stage startups, primarily around building their support programs. The goal is to create a customer support experience that people actually look forward to engaging with, rather than dreading.
I use what I call a five-pillar program to help organizations move through that process. It starts with building the essential elements of a support foundation, then progressing to a more advanced level, and finally evolving into a truly dynamic program. This covers everything from selecting the right tools to leveraging AI to supercharge your support capabilities.
While I'm tool-agnostic and have experience with a range of platforms like Intercom and Salesforce Service Cloud, my go-to for implementation is typically Zendesk. But the real focus is on optimizing your tech stack to empower your team, not hinder them, and ensuring you're not overinvesting in features you don't yet need.
Q: What are some of the key challenges you see companies facing as they try to scale their support operations?
Jordan: One of the biggest issues is this notion that customer support is purely a cost center - a necessary evil that companies begrudgingly invest in. But if you build your support team right, they are your customer experts. They're the ones who deeply understand your users' needs, challenges, and feedback.
The most successful organizations I've worked with have a tight feedback loop between support and product. As the support team surfaces insights and the product team incorporates that into their roadmap, you actually start to see ticket volume decrease because you're proactively addressing friction points.
Another challenge is around tooling. A lot of early-stage companies will overinvest in a massive Zendesk or Salesforce package that they're not fully utilizing. The key is to build for what you need now with a clear path to layering on more advanced capabilities as you grow. You don't need to start with the Mercedes if the Honda will get you where you need to go.
Q: Can you share an example of how a company you've worked with has leveraged support insights to drive meaningful improvements?
Jordan: Sure. One company I worked with was seeing a major spike in ticket volume during their busiest season, primarily around the status of transactions in their system. Customers were seeing a generic "in progress" message but craving more granular details.
The support team surfaced this insight, and we were able to go back to the product team with clear recommendations. We updated the API to pull in more detailed status data from both sides of the marketplace, providing customers with greater visibility into things like turnaround times and next steps.
This relatively simple change, driven by support team insights, led to a significant drop in ticket volume during the next peak season. It freed up the team to focus on more complex, high-value interactions rather than fielding the same status inquiries over and over.
Q: For a startup that maybe hasn't yet invested in a formal ticketing system or BI tools, what's the most important thing they can do today to future-proof their support operation?
Jordan: I think the biggest thing, even before investing in tooling, is to define your organizational structure and processes for tracking and managing customer inquiries. If you don't have a ticketing system, that might mean clearly outlining what needs to be documented, where it's stored, and who is responsible for following up.
Having those foundational elements in place will make the eventual transition to a dedicated support platform so much smoother. You're not starting from scratch in terms of taxonomy, reporting structure, SLAs, etc.
And then when you are ready to level up your tooling, you can make those investments with confidence, knowing that you're building on a solid process foundation. You're not just throwing money at a shiny new platform and hoping it will magically solve all your support challenges.
In Conclusion
Our conversation with Jordan underscored the critical importance of viewing customer support as a strategic driver of business value, not just a cost center. A few key themes emerged:
- A tiered approach to building out support capabilities, starting with foundational elements and layering on more advanced functionality as you scale, can help prevent overinvestment and painful growing pains.
- Tight alignment between support and product, with a steady flow of data-driven insights, can meaningfully reduce ticket volume by proactively eliminating customer pain points.
- Even before investing in formal support tooling, startups can set themselves up for success by clearly defining their support processes, taxonomies, and data capture requirements.
As a veteran of both B2B and B2C support organizations, Jordan brings a wealth of front-line experience to his consulting practice. His pragmatic, process-oriented approach to scaling support offers a roadmap for startups looking to turn their customer experience into a true competitive advantage.
