You Can’t Document a History You Weren’t in the Room For

Sarah Caminiti has spent more than 15 years building, fixing, and scaling CX teams. Her position on knowledge is blunt: a support team can’t own all of a company’s information, and it can’t keep any of it current from outside the rooms where decisions get made.

Knowledge management outgrew the CX team

Knowledge management isn’t what it used to be, Sarah says. AI and the push for self-service landed on CX teams without the headcount or strategy to match, and some are stalling on new tools because they know the foundation underneath isn’t solid.

Her answer: CX can’t be in charge of all of it, because that would mean being in rooms it isn’t invited to. The fix is a CX leader in the room where the product roadmap gets built. Support sees the pain, not the happy path: the gaps, the cracks, the asks, and the different ways customers describe things.

“How are we supposed to understand a history that we were not in the room for?”

Without that seat, teams are forced to make assumptions, and Sarah’s view is that forcing people to assume is a way of saying you don’t value their success enough to give them what they need.

Start with the nest

Brett asked the chicken-and-egg question: update external knowledge first, internal SOPs first, or everything at once? Sarah’s answer: “I don’t think it’s chicken or egg, I think it’s just the nest.” The nest is a set of habits.

• Internal questions go in a team channel, never a DM. It shares the answer and gives people permission to ask.
• Pull one person off the queue for two hours a week to turn those answers into knowledge. The articles don’t have to be perfect.
• Run a maintenance calendar. Use your tagging taxonomy to pick one category, such as billing, and give it a month of focused review. At a bare minimum, every article gets validated once a year.
• Start internal before external. If your team is confused about the basics, customers will feel it.

The payoff is confidence in the room. A team that has gone deep on one category walks into the billing team’s meeting with real questions, and can say “we don’t have that information” instead of being expected to be an encyclopedia of the internal wiki.

Brett described how he built the same idea into Frame.io: every support specialist spent 20% of their time on operations, paired with one of four product managers, bringing the voice of the customer. Not the full list of 247 bugs, but the top five worth fixing in the next two weeks.

Sarah’s point on that model is that it only works if you staff for it. Too many teams are only allowed to staff for queue management, which turns everything else into a sacrifice or unpaid overtime for salaried people. Her version is a career path that keeps people in the queue 20 to 40 percent of the time while they build toward coding, marketing, or other skills that put them in the room with engineers. And that room matters in both directions: a request that sounds like moving a button can turn out to be an 18-person, nine-month sprint, and proving it deserves that work takes data.

Brett also raised a shift he’s seeing on teams he’s talked to: support moving out of go-to-market and into product, with one person owning the internal wiki, SOPs, and external documentation. Sarah still believes CX should be its own function, but calls the move a step in the right direction because “we can’t be tying revenue to pain.”

She closes on AI. Customers usually fill out a CSAT for small things, like a password reset or a billing issue someone walked them through, and for most customers support is the only human they meet. “You will never be able to blindly trust AI,” she says, so teams have to keep checking its output. And when she assesses a team, she looks for one thing: everyone on the CX team should still get to help someone with a password.

• Sarah Caminiti on LinkedIn
• The Career Strategist (Sarah’s LinkedIn newsletter)
• Plain
• Pageloop
• Dataland

• Youtube
• Spotify