Doc Shufelt and the Small Question Behind a Long Queue

A SIM card is a small thing to build a business lesson around. At Republic Wireless, though, customers kept asking for help putting one into a phone. Tickets arrived, then more tickets. Doc Shufelt and his colleagues could see the repetition. Understanding it required a different kind of attention: they asked a small customer-support partner to make appointments with customers and watch them attempt the installation.

Some sessions took 45 minutes. Customers were breaking phones and snapping SIM cards. An operation that could count incoming requests still needed someone to observe the ordinary act producing them. In Shufelt’s telling, the episode exposed something digital service can lose: the opportunity to stand beside a customer and see what is actually happening. The smallest component in the box had become a rather demanding member of staff.

That story offers a useful entrance to Shufelt’s career. He is the co-founder and former CEO of ArenaCX, the Raleigh company that grew out of Republic Wireless’s work on customer service. His subject is the machinery behind a helpful answer: how people are assigned, how work moves, what gets measured and where judgment belongs. The customer sees a reply. Shufelt’s work has concerned the arrangements that make that reply possible.

The telephone company without the telephone queue

By November 2018, Shufelt was Republic Wireless’s senior vice president and general manager. The company had just received the North Carolina Technology Association’s award for using technology in customer service. Its approach included a conspicuous omission for a phone business: a conventional 1-800 support number. Republic had chosen to put its confidence in online help.

“We believed that waiting on hold to speak to an agent was a thing of the past,” Shufelt said. It was a pointed position for someone selling connectivity. A telephone company asking customers to stop telephoning it sounds like the beginning of a complaint. Republic’s proposition depended on making the alternative worth choosing.

The award belonged to the company, and the work involved a team. Still, Shufelt’s explanation reveals the operational bet he was willing to defend. Familiarity alone did not make a service channel useful. An established ritual could be questioned if another arrangement gave customers a better way through. The absence of a phone queue was only persuasive if help remained present.

Before the marketplace, the plumbing

Shufelt’s route into this work passed through English, business school and project management. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Richmond in 2002 and an MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. His earlier project work included software at Title Guaranty Escrow Services in Honolulu. At Bandwidth, his responsibilities included billing implementation and business architecture.

These are occupations in which a grand idea eventually has to meet a migration plan. Billing systems must connect. Information must arrive in usable form. Departments have to agree on what happens next. His résumé describes coordinating technical and accounting work, then later managing the separation of Republic Wireless from Bandwidth. There is a considerable distance between a proposal and an operation that survives Monday morning; much of his working life has occupied it.

That background makes his interest in service infrastructure easier to understand. A customer’s unanswered question can look like a staffing problem. It may also be a routing problem, a knowledge problem or a failure to notice what the customer is trying to do. His career supplies a sequence of increasingly large settings in which those dependencies matter.

A queue learns to move

ArenaCX began with a problem inside Republic. Support demand could fluctuate enough to pull colleagues from elsewhere in the company into answering tickets. At quieter times, agents could have less work than their capacity allowed. The team built a way to move work between support teams according to their results. By April 2020, it was presenting that internal experiment as a product for other businesses.

The early system classified requests using machine learning and natural-language processing. Teams competed on criteria chosen by the customer company, and better performance on a type of request could earn a team more of that work. Queue monitoring helped prevent a pileup. The reported result at Republic was a reduction of about one-third in support costs while customer satisfaction increased.

Those two outcomes belong together. Cost alone can be reduced by making help harder to obtain, an accomplishment unlikely to inspire a thank-you note. The interesting ambition was to improve the allocation of work while keeping the customer’s experience in view. Shufelt’s new company was offering businesses a way to manage that relationship.

Two million dollars, three interested parties

In September 2020, ArenaCX announced a $2 million seed round led by Sovereign’s Capital. Shufelt was CEO; Alan Pendleton was his fellow founder. The business had moved from an internal solution toward a separate company, with investors backing the effort to turn a useful arrangement into a market.

The financing announcement described three constituencies: businesses buying support, contact centers delivering it and customers waiting for answers. Each needed a reason to participate. Businesses wanted flexibility and control over costs. Providers needed worthwhile work and rewards for performing well. Customers needed the original problem solved. A marketplace that satisfied only its buyer would leave the other two groups to express their disappointment through the service itself.

Shufelt’s own announcement thanked investors, advisers and contact-center partners, including people connected to Republic Wireless and Bandwidth. It ended with “Rock on!” - a small departure from the usual financial-announcement furniture. Behind the funding figure sat a more practical aspiration: give support leaders control over outcomes without requiring every change in demand to become another hiring, training and scheduling exercise.

The spreadsheet has a human supervisor

In December 2020, ArenaCX announced its app listing in the Zendesk Marketplace. Shufelt’s argument concerned fixed headcount: businesses could arrange support around a set number of agents, then discover that demand had paid no attention to the arrangement. The product offered adjustments in ticket allocation, with controls for the volume and kinds of work sent to different teams.

The details matter because a working company has obligations as well as preferences. Existing outsourcing contracts need to be respected. Internal teams need enough work. A control that simply sends everything to yesterday’s fastest performer can create tomorrow’s difficulty. The announced minimum and maximum settings acknowledged that allocating work requires boundaries.

Shufelt also described a general manager’s changing instructions: at one moment the priority might be reducing costs; at another, protecting the experience around a product launch. Software can execute a choice with consistency. Deciding what deserves protection requires someone to understand the business situation. His emphasis on “the human technology partnership” leaves that responsibility with people.

A founder willing to keep work inside

One of Shufelt’s more revealing positions sets limits on his own industry’s pitch. Discussing outsourcing, he argued that early companies may need to keep support close to the people building the product. When a business is still discovering whether customers want what it makes, the conversation itself carries information too useful to place at a distance.

He also singled out deeply customized technical work as a reason to retain internal expertise. This is a meaningful qualification from a marketplace founder. It gives the buyer permission to make distinctions. An organization can seek external help for some work while protecting the exchanges that teach it what to build next.

His account of managing outside partners was equally concrete. Teams wrote notes congratulating partner staff on good performance. A contractual boundary did not need to become a social one. “If you treat them like part of your company they will act like they’re part of your company,” he said. The note is a modest managerial instrument. It does, however, arrive addressed to a person.

“If you treat them like part of your company they will act like they’re part of your company.”

Doc Shufelt, on working with support partners

The question that outlasts the job title

Shufelt’s public professional profile now lists Members Mobile, returning the visible outline of his career to wireless. ArenaCX remains part of his history as a co-founder and former CEO. The through-line is his repeated involvement in the less visible decisions that shape an everyday service.

His work invites attention to a particular kind of business problem: one that looks routine until somebody watches closely. A help request can become feedback for a product team. A partner can become a colleague worth congratulating. A queue can reveal that the company has organized itself around an assumption its customers never agreed to.

The SIM-card episode remains the most economical illustration. The business had requests, counts and a recurring difficulty. Someone still had to sit with the customer. For an executive whose work involved routing technology and marketplaces, that is a pleasingly ordinary lesson to carry forward. Before deciding how to process the next thousand questions, spend a little time understanding one.