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Flipping the Support Model: Lessons from Bolt’s Journey

Kincy Clark tore down the classic tiered support model at Bolt and rebuilt it around a routing layer, problem structure and teams matched to what people do best.

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with Kincy Clark, Head of Support at Bolt

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49:41

Introduction

The classic tiered support model buries your most technical people three layers away from customers and turns tier three into a priesthood everyone wants to join for the wrong reasons. At Bolt, Kincy Clark decided to flip it on its side.

Drawing on a military habit of designing the organisation before the process, he classified issues by how structured they are, built a routing layer that sends each problem straight to the right specialised team, and made every single team customer-facing. The result: faster responses, happier agents, and a model where escalation is a handoff, not an escape hatch.

What you will learn in this episode

  • Classifying issues by structure — from fully documented playbooks to true unknowns

  • How a routing layer replaces the tier-one funnel and kills bad career incentives

  • Empowered rerouting vs deliberate handoffs, and why the words matter

  • Matching people to the problems they genuinely want to solve

  • Why organisational design comes before process design

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