The script was forty-three pages long. This was not unusual. The provider had developed scripts for every client they worked with and the scripts had a standard structure that had been refined across hundreds of deployments into something that was genuinely useful for the agents who used it and genuinely reassuring for the clients who approved it. The script told the agent what to say at the beginning of the call, how to identify the issue, which questions to ask in which order, how to navigate the most common problem types, what to offer when the first resolution did not work, how to escalate, how to close. It was comprehensive. It was clear. It was the kind of document that, when presented to a client for review and approval, produces a feeling of reassurance that is real but incomplete, real because the document is genuinely good at what it is designed to do, incomplete because what it is designed to do is not the same as what the support function needs to do. The CEO had approved it. Not without reading it. Had read every page, had suggested twelve revisions, had pushed back on three sections that described resolution pathways for product issues that the CEO knew from the support ticket review were more complex than the script allowed for, had received revised versions of those sections that were better than the originals and still not quite right, and had approved the final version because the final version was as good as a forty-three page script could be and a forty-three page script was what the model required and the model had been chosen and the choosing was done. The script went live on the first day of full operation by the provider. On the provider side, Gil had spent two weeks before the go-live with his twelve agents, working through the script section by section. He had not supplemented it in ways that contradicted it. He had built around it in ways that he believed filled the gaps the script left when the customer's situation was more specific than the script assumed. He did this through questions. He taught his agents to ask one more question than the script required before moving to the resolution pathway, not to extend the call but to ensure the resolution pathway they chose was the right one. He taught them to listen for the thing the customer said after the obvious thing, because the obvious thing was usually the presenting problem and the thing said after it was usually the real one. He had learned this over six years in the provider. Not from training. From being on the phones himself, and from watching agents who were good at this work versus agents who were efficient at this work, and from understanding that the distance between good and efficient was exactly the distance between the customer who wrote a paragraph about the call eighteen months later and the customer who closed the survey and did not think about it again. He had never read the paragraph about Priya. He did not know it existed. But he had built his team to do what Priya had done. Whether the structure would allow them to keep doing it was a different question.

The first call of the day under full operation by the provider lasted four minutes and twelve seconds. The CEO knew this because Sandra, who was still working out her notice period, had sat with the quality assurance team and listened to the first ten calls of the day and had written a brief summary that she left on the CEO's desk at lunchtime. The summary said the following. The first call lasted four minutes and twelve seconds. The customer had a billing question. The agent handled it correctly, located the relevant account information, provided an accurate answer, offered a follow-up confirmation email and closed the call in the approved manner. The customer's post-call satisfaction score was four out of five. The CEO read this and thought: this is what we were paying for. Then read the rest of Sandra's summary. The second call lasted six minutes and forty seconds. The customer had a product issue that fell into one of the three categories the CEO had pushed back on during the script review. The agent followed the revised script pathway, which was better than the original and still not quite right. The customer's issue was partially resolved. The agent offered an escalation and the customer accepted. The post-call satisfaction score was three out of five. The third call lasted eleven minutes. The issue was one that the script did not cover directly, a combination of a product limitation and a customer expectation that had been set incorrectly somewhere earlier in the customer journey. The agent followed the closest applicable script pathway, which was not quite the right pathway, and the customer knew it, and the agent knew that the customer knew, and the eleven minutes were the product of both of them working around this shared knowledge in a way that was professionally managed and ultimately unsatisfying. The post-call satisfaction score was two out of five. The CEO read to the end of Sandra's summary. Of the first ten calls, six had been handled correctly and efficiently and had produced satisfaction scores of four or five. Three had been handled adequately but not well, with satisfaction scores of three. One had not been handled well and had produced a satisfaction score of one, which meant the customer had rated the interaction as very poor and had left a free-text comment that Sandra had transcribed at the bottom of the summary. The free-text comment said: the person I spoke to clearly did not understand my situation. I have been a customer for three years and this is the first time I have felt like I was talking to someone reading from a script rather than someone who actually knew what was going on. The CEO read this comment twice. Then read the previous customer satisfaction data for the last full month of the internal support team's operation. In that month, of the calls that had received a free-text comment, fourteen percent had mentioned the word understanding in a positive context. Three percent had mentioned a script, all three in a positive context, meaning the customer had been surprised to learn that the resolution they had received was based on a structured approach because it had not felt scripted. No customer had ever, in three years of records, left a comment saying they felt like they were talking to someone reading from a script. The CEO put Sandra's summary in the top drawer of the desk. The script had a section called Handling Difficult Customers. It occupied pages thirty-one through thirty-seven and it described, in careful and considerate language, the techniques that agents should use when a customer was upset, confused, frustrated or using language that fell outside the bounds of what the interaction guidelines described as a constructive conversation. The techniques were reasonable. They reflected genuine understanding of how to de-escalate a tense interaction, how to acknowledge a customer's frustration without accepting responsibility for things that were not the company's responsibility, how to move a conversation toward resolution when both parties had stopped making progress. What the section did not contain was any guidance on what to do when the customer's frustration was legitimate. Not irrational. Not disproportionate. Legitimate. When the customer was upset because the product had failed in a way the product should not have failed. When the customer was confused because they had been given incorrect information at an earlier point in their journey. When the customer was frustrated because they had called before and the issue had not been resolved and they were calling again and they should not have had to call again. The script described these situations in terms of de-escalation because the script was designed to manage interactions, and management implies a certain neutrality about whether the underlying situation is right or wrong. The agent's job, as the script defined it, was to handle the interaction effectively. The question of whether the company owed the customer more than an effectively handled interaction was not a question the script was designed to ask. Priya would have asked it. Not out loud. Not in a way that created a problem or established a precedent or committed the company to anything. She would have asked it internally, in the moment, while listening to the customer, and the answer she arrived at would have shaped everything that followed. The extra minutes. The willingness to go beyond the defined resolution pathway. The sense the customer had, afterward, of having been genuinely heard by someone who had genuinely tried. The CEO thought about this while reading the Handling Difficult Customers section for the third time. Then opened a new document and wrote a memo to Diane. The memo said: I have been reviewing the script and I have a concern about the section on Handling Difficult Customers. The current approach focuses on de-escalation techniques. I believe we need to add guidance on how agents should respond when a customer's frustration is legitimate, meaning when the company is at fault or has fallen short. The guidance should make clear that in these situations the agent's role is not to manage the customer's emotion but to genuinely address the underlying cause. I would like to discuss how we incorporate this. The CEO read the memo and then thought about how Diane would receive it and then thought about whether the thing the memo was trying to achieve could be achieved through a memo, which was a version of the same question the CEO had been asking since the signing of the contract. Can a thing that lives in a person be specified in a document. The CEO sent the memo anyway. Diane responded the following day. The response was professional and constructive and proposed a half-day workshop on empathy-led resolution for the provider's team leads, after which the team leads would incorporate the learnings into their coaching approach with the agents. The CEO approved the workshop. The workshop happened. The CEO did not attend. The team leads received the learnings. The coaching approach was adjusted. The script was not changed because changing the script required a formal change request process that both sides had agreed to in the contract and the formal change request process took three weeks and by the time the change was approved the agents had been handling calls for three weeks using the original approach and the habits of those three weeks were already forming in the ways that habits form, invisibly, through repetition, in the space between what the training says to do and what actually happens when a real customer is on the line with a real problem and the script does not quite fit the situation.

Iris had not filed a complaint. Not yet. She had told one person, a friend outside the company, who had listened and had said that what Marco was doing sounded like it was making her uncomfortable and that the fact that it made her uncomfortable was the thing that mattered, not whether Marco intended it to. She had thought about this for a week. Then she had gone to the team lead of the operational team, a young man named Devin who was twenty-nine and who had been in the team lead role for eight months and who was, in the way of people who are good at their job but have not yet been in it long enough to know what they are supposed to do when the job contains something unexpected, trying to handle the situation with more confidence than he felt. Devin had listened to Iris. Had then had a conversation with Marco. Marco had said that he understood Iris was uncomfortable and that he did not want her to be uncomfortable and that he would stop. He had said this genuinely. Then he had sent one more message. Not a long one. Not explicit. Just one more attempt at understanding, at being heard, at having the hurt acknowledged by the person who could not acknowledge it without giving him something she was not prepared to give. Iris read the message. She went back to Devin. Devin had the second conversation with Marco. Marco was quieter this time. He said he understood. Devin went to Sandra. Sandra had managed difficult interpersonal situations for fifteen years. She had managed them in the way that someone manages them when they understand that the difficulty is real and human on both sides and that the management is not about assigning fault but about creating the conditions in which both people can continue to work without the situation compounding. She had three conversations. One with Iris. One with Marco. One with Devin. After the three conversations she came to the CEO. "I want to tell you about something that is happening in the team," said Sandra. She described it. "What does Iris want?" asked the CEO. "She wants it to stop," said Sandra. "She wants the friendship, if that is still possible, and she wants the other thing to stop. She has not asked for anything formal." "And Marco?" said the CEO. "Marco is not a bad person," said Sandra. "He is a person who is in pain and who does not know how to manage that pain without directing it toward the person who is the source of it. Which is exactly the problem." "Is Devin managing it?" said the CEO. "Devin is trying," said Sandra. "He does not have the experience for this. I am managing it through him. But I want you to know it is happening because if it escalates it will need your attention at a level that I cannot manage." The CEO thanked Sandra. Sandra left. The CEO sat with this alongside the contract and the script and the knowledge transfer assessment and the cultural alignment clause on page eighty-nine. Owen was managing his team through the transition with the steady focus of someone who has decided that the situation is what it is and that the only useful response is to do the work well regardless of the situation. He had not been asked to change what he was doing. He had not been given any particular acknowledgment that what he was doing was working. He had simply continued. His team had noticed this. Not as a revelation. As a gradual accumulation of evidence that the person responsible for their day-to-day work was not going to let the disruption above them become a disruption in their immediate environment. This was not a small thing. In the context of a company going through a significant structural change, having a manager who maintained the quality and the calm of the immediate work environment was the specific thing that allowed people to keep doing good work while the larger change was happening. Owen did not know his team had noticed. They had not told him. People do not always tell their managers the things they most need to hear about themselves. Sometimes they tell each other. Hana was still at her desk at seven-thirty on a Thursday evening when the script had been live for three weeks. She was not working on anything specific. She was thinking about the thing that had been happening to Iris, which she knew about because Iris had told her, and about Tomás, who was at his desk three rows away and who was working on something that required his complete attention and who had not looked up in forty minutes. She looked at the cactus in the terracotta pot. The pattern of pale ridges running vertically along the stem. The particular quality of a plant that has been through difficult conditions and has not died. Tomás looked up. Not at her. At the ceiling, in the way of someone who is thinking and needs a surface to think against. Then back at his screen. She did not look away before he did. This time was different. She was not sure how it was different. But it was closer to something than any of the previous times, and the closeness had a weight to it that the previous times had not had, the weight of time accumulated, of a thing that had been almost happening for two years and that was becoming harder to keep almost happening without it actually happening.

Maya left a message for the CEO that evening. The message said: one of the provider's agents asked me this morning what to do when a customer's problem is partly the company's responsibility and partly not. I told them to stay with it until it was sorted. They asked what the escalation process was for the part that was not the company's responsibility. I said there wasn't one. They asked how they were supposed to handle it then. I said: you just stay with it. They asked: for how long? Maya had written at the bottom of the message, in smaller letters than the rest: I did not know how to answer that. On the provider side, Gil read the same question in the quality assurance report from that week, flagged as an unresolved escalation. He pulled the call recording. Listened to it. Then added it to the coaching session for the following Tuesday. He did not escalate it upward. There was no point escalating it upward. The answer to the question for how long was not in any escalation pathway. It was in a quality of person that the script could not produce and the SLA could not measure. He was trying to produce it through coaching. He was not sure he was succeeding. Maya left at the end of the month. Not dramatically. She came to the CEO's office on a Tuesday morning and said she had been offered a role that she thought was the right next step for her and that she was grateful for everything the company had given her and that she wished everyone well. "Where are you going?" asked the CEO. "A small company," said Maya. "Early stage. They need someone to help them think about how they capture and share knowledge before they grow past the point where it happens naturally. I thought it was a good fit." "It sounds like a perfect fit," said the CEO. "I learned what I know about it here," said Maya. "I hope that is alright." "It is more than alright," said the CEO. "It is the best possible outcome of the work you did here." "I want to leave the notebooks in good order," said Maya. "I will spend my last two weeks making sure everything is documented in a way that will be useful for whoever comes after me." "There is one thing I want to say before I go," said Maya. "The provider team is trying. I want you to know that. Diane is trying. The agents are trying. They are working with what they have and what they have is not nothing. It is just not what we had." "I know," said the CEO. "I am not sure the gap is closable from where they are starting," said Maya. "I wanted to say that because I think you know it and I think it is important that someone says it out loud." "Thank you for saying it," said the CEO. "I hope it works out," said Maya. She left the office and the CEO sat for a long time looking at the space where she had been sitting. Priya was gone. Sandra was leaving. Maya was leaving. Three people. Each one carrying something that could not be transferred in a discovery session or documented in a knowledge base or captured in a script, however thoughtfully written, however carefully approved. The CEO thought about the Cultural Alignment Obligations clause on page eighty-nine of the contract. About the lawyers who had said it was difficult to measure and difficult to enforce. About Jonathan who had signed it without comment. The clause was in the contract. The culture was leaving with Maya. The CEO walked through the support area that evening after most people had gone home. The provider's agents had their own section now, a defined area with their workstations and their team lead stations and a small alcove with a printer and a coffee machine that the provider had installed as part of their standard setup for client sites. The coffee machine was a good one. Better than the one the support team had used before. The CEO noticed this and noticed noticing it, the slight absurdity of observing that the equipment had improved as the capability it supported had diminished. The green notebooks were in a cabinet in the corner of the room. Not displayed. Not accessible in the way they had been when Maya was there to contextualise them, to pull out the relevant entry and explain not just what it said but why it had been written. Just in a cabinet. Organised. Indexed. Available. The CEO opened the cabinet and took out the first notebook. The cover was dark green with big black spots. The handwriting inside was Maya's, clear and precise, the handwriting of someone who writes carefully because they know other people will need to read it. The first entry was dated three years earlier and described a customer conversation that had revealed something about the product that none of them had understood until that conversation happened. The CEO read the entry. Then the one that followed it, and the one that followed that, for about twenty minutes, standing at the cabinet in the empty support area while the building settled into its evening quiet around them. Then put the notebook back in the cabinet and closed the door and turned off the light and went home. The following morning the CEO wrote a message to Joel. The message said: I want to talk about what we do if this does not work. Joel responded within ten minutes. The message said: I have been waiting for you to say that.

End of Chapter 7

Writer's Thought:

The coffee machine is better. The CEO noticed it. I am still thinking about what that means.

Here is What is Broken. The CEO. The Script.

MarvinPro | March 2026

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