Support lab home
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.

with Kincy Clark, Head of Support at Bolt

play the video
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
All episodes










