What support leaders should fix at mid-year before the fourth quarter crush

Somewhere around June, I start getting the same question from support leaders: how do we not repeat Q4 last year?

The honest answer is usually: fix what's been quietly broken since January, before the volume forces your hand.

#The mid-year trap

A lot of teams treat the halfway mark as a check-in instead of a fix-it point. They review the numbers, note what's behind plan, and keep running the same routing rules and triggers they set up in January, or longer ago. Nobody revisits automation once it's live. It just keeps running, quietly misrouting tickets or triggering surveys nobody reads.

That's not a strategy problem. It's neglect, and it's fixable in a week if you make the time now.

#Three things worth fixing before Q4

Audit anything running on autopilot. Pull up your routing rules, triggers, and automations. If nobody's touched them in six months, that's exactly why they need a look. I've found triggers firing on conditions that stopped being true two reorgs ago.

Stop collecting feedback you don't act on. If you're running a survey and nobody owns turning the results into a change, stop running it. Feedback without an owner isn't insight. It's noise with a nicer name.

Track outcomes, not ticket counts. Ticket volume tells leadership you're busy. It doesn't tell you whether the same problem keeps coming back. If a customer reopens a ticket within a few days, that's the number that matters, not how fast you closed it the first time.

#Why this matters before Q4 specifically

Whatever's broken quietly in July becomes an emergency in November when volume triples. Fixing it now, while there's slack in the system, is the cheapest it will ever be to fix.

#Where to start

Pull your automation rules and triggers and go through them line by line this week. Cancel one survey you don't act on. Pick one metric tied to repeat contact instead of speed and start watching it. None of this requires new headcount or new software. It requires an afternoon and the discipline to actually look.

This is exactly the kind of mid-year audit we run as part of Operate, catching what's quietly drifted before Q4 makes it expensive.

---

Founded by Ty Givens, CX Collective becomes the support operations partner growing companies wish they could hire full time. With 25+ years running support, workforce management, and QA programs from scratch, Ty brings what she's actually built and run, not theory, to every engagement.