Field research · Customer Operations · 2026
Searvis is independent research into one enterprise problem. The same customer operations failures happen for years. Everyone can see them. Nobody owns fixing them. I want to understand why they keep surviving, so I'm talking to the people who deal with them every day.
No product. No pitch. Research in progress.
The premise
Working hypothesis, not a finding. Discovery will confirm it or kill it.
Enterprises have spent a decade instrumenting customer operations. There are dashboards for containment, handle time, CSAT, transfer rates, deflection. The measurement problem is largely solved.
The explanation problem is not. A repeat-contact rate tells you the number went up. It doesn't tell you what caused it: which broken policy, which failed handoff, which misrouted bot. It doesn't tell you what that costs, or who should fix it.
Newer tools are starting to help. They can rank why customers contact you and what it costs. But the harder part comes next. The failure gets found and still goes nowhere, because no one owns it and no one has put a price on it. A problem with no owner and no cost attached always loses to one that has both.
If I'm right, this is a real and expensive problem. If I'm wrong, I want to know now, before I build anything.
Systems already tell you
Repeat contact rate rose 18% this quarter
Nobody can tell you
Which three issues drove it, and what they cost
Systems already tell you
Bot containment dropped in the billing intent
Nobody can tell you
Whether it's the bot, the policy, or the data behind it
Systems already tell you
Escalations cluster on Tuesdays in one queue
Nobody can tell you
Who owns the fix, or why last quarter's fix didn't hold
The left column is a solved problem. The right column is the research.
Open questions
The questions behind every conversation. They change as I learn more. That's the point.
01
Which recurring failures are painful enough to actually fund?
Plenty of things hurt. Very few get budget. The gap between those is the whole question.
02
Who actually owns a failure that spans four teams?
No owner, no buyer. And most real failures cross org lines by definition.
03
How do you really find root cause today?
Not the process on the slide. The one that happens at 9pm during an incident.
04
What do your dashboards refuse to explain?
Everyone has the tools. I want to know where they stop being useful.
05
Where do AI agents create new operational failures?
Automation moves work. Sometimes it moves the breakage somewhere less visible.
06
What would you want to see in your own data tomorrow?
The honest test of whether any of this matters enough to pull for.
Who's asking
I've spent over a decade selling into contact centers and customer operations. Cloud communications at Twilio. CX testing and conversational AI assurance at Cyara. AI voice infrastructure at Telnyx. Automation at Kognitos.
Which means I've seen this from the wrong side of the table. I've sat in hundreds of enterprise evaluations watching teams buy tools to measure problems they already knew they had. The tooling kept improving. The same failures kept recurring.
I don't know yet whether that's a product. That's what the research is for.
Based in Atlanta.
Background at alrazibashir.com
Who I'm talking to
If a recurring failure lands on your desk and stays there, you're who I'm looking for. I'm focused on high-volume consumer service operations, where the same problem costs you a thousand times a month.
Insurance & payers
Claims, policy service, member services, appeals & grievances
Consumer banking
Servicing, disputes, fraud ops, digital support
Health systems
Patient access, revenue cycle, patient experience
Telecom & utilities
Billing, provisioning, field service coordination
Titles I'm reaching out to
What you get
What this isn't
The ask
I'm interviewing customer operations leaders through 2026. There's no product yet, so I have nothing to sell you. I'm trying to find out whether this problem is as real as I think. You'd know better than I would.
al@searvis.io · Atlanta, GA
