Support knows exactly where the product breaks. Almost nobody is asking it.
I'm Fred Thomas. For ten years I've built and modernized the systems behind technical support teams, four of them inside Zendesk as a Senior Support Engineer. That's platform knowledge you only get from the inside, and it's why I don't open an engagement by reading your dashboards. I start with the queue.
Every support organization I've worked in was measured on how fast it closed tickets. None of them were measured on whether the same ticket came back. The team gets very good at absorbing a problem, the number stays green, and the thing that caused it never reaches anyone who could fix it. That gap is usually the actual engagement.
I build these functions, and I step into running ones.
Both demand the same skill: turning what frontline teams experience every day into cleaner systems and better decisions.
- →Zendesk platform architecture, governance, and multi-instance administrationThe operating surface, built to hold up at scale.
- →AI strategy from pilot to productionTicket deflection and Tier-1 automation, deployed without breaking what already works.
- →Event-driven incident workflowsConnecting your ticketing, incident tooling, and product telemetry into one flow.
- →Cross-functional alignmentReal coordination across Support, Product, Engineering, and DevOps.
- →Team developmentHiring, coaching, and building the systems people who end up owning the platform.
At NextRoll, as Senior Manager of CX Systems:
A decade operating support, four years of it inside Zendesk.
Four years inside Zendesk itself: SSO and auth, DNS, SSL, API, Insights. Product champion for authentication. This is the knowledge you can't get from the outside, and it's what Keel is built on.
Multi-instance Zendesk governance across 450+ global agents and 15,000+ monthly tickets: workflows, automations, an AI chatbot, and the cross-functional program management that made any of it stick.
The technology is the tool. The people are the point. If you're scaling a support team, modernizing Zendesk, or trying to deploy AI without breaking what already works, that's the work I do.