I have spent over twenty years sorting out customers. Now I build bots that do it too.
On the frontline and leading teams, across retail, banking, logistics, hospitality and emergency response. The whole point of this business is that I have actually done the job.
Damien Riley, founder, Five Star CS Systems, Leeds.
I'm Damien Riley, and I've spent over twenty years in customer service. On the frontline and leading teams. The whole point of this business is that I've actually done the job, for a long time, in places where getting it wrong had real consequences.
I started on the phones at a bank in Leeds. From there it's been a fairly unusual run. I've looked after frustrated accounts in logistics, where I built a customer-complaints database that lifted delivery performance from 82 percent to 91 percent. I've run bars and managed a four-star hotel floor in Leeds, where I won a TripAdvisor award and once held the record for the most TripAdvisor mentions in a single weekend. I've even worked blue-light emergency response, assisting paramedics, which teaches you very quickly how to stay calm for someone whose day has gone wrong.
My last desk job was leading and coaching a customer-service team at a UK-leading home retailer in Leeds. I joined on the frontline and worked up to team leader, and my desk was the escalations, the complaints, and the difficult conversations the frontline couldn't resolve. When the business rolled out a new phone system, I got the team through the transition and wrote the team-leader guide for it, the kind of work a company would normally pay a consultant to do.
Today, Five Star CS Systems is my full-time work. When you hire me, you get all of my attention: the build, the care, and the twenty years of judgement behind both, pointed at your business.
Two decades on the desk
Real numbers from a real customer-service career, earned on the desk.
Why I moved from the desk to the build.
Here's the thing I noticed after all those years. Most of what fills a support inbox isn't hard. It's the same handful of questions, asked again and again, and the real challenge is keeping up with the volume without ever letting the tone slip. That's a job a bot can do well, if it's built by someone who knows what good actually looks like.
So that's what I do now. I taught myself to build AI agents, by building them, and I bring both sides to the table, the technology and the person on the other end of it. A lot of people building these bots know the code inside out but have never had an upset customer in front of them. I started from the customer. I know the worry sitting behind the question, and I know the moment someone's quietly about to give up on you, because I've watched it happen across twenty years. I build the bot around that, and the code just carries the service.
Let me be straight with you. A bot won't replace you, and it shouldn't try to. What it does is take the repetitive load off your plate and hand you the matters that genuinely need a person, cleanly, so you can spend your time where it counts. That's the whole offer. Real customer-service craft, built into something that runs while you get on with the rest of the business.
The same judgement, free.
The seven reply templates in the giveaway carry the same twenty years of judgement you've just read about. Run your numbers through the calculator and they're yours to keep, no strings.
Tell me what's taking up your time.
A plain conversation to start. I'll tell you honestly whether a bot helps and which size fits.