September 2026 · 10 min read · 32 skills, free

AI for Customer Service: 32 Claude Skills to Run a Support Desk

Thirty-two skills that follow a support desk service in one arc: the hardest moment first, then the queue and the team behind it, the roles and metrics that decide who owns decisions, the escalations, what the tickets teach you, and the answers that stop repeat work. Claude drafts and routes, a person answers anyone who is upset.

01What these skills are

A whole customer service desk, as installable Claude skills

This is AI for customer service that keeps a person on every upset customer: Claude drafts the rules, the replies, the reports and the bot's handoff, and your team does the answering.

The pack follows a support desk in eight parts, from the upset customer to adding AI and bots without trapping anyone.

The red line: Claude drafts and routes; a person answers anyone who is upset, at risk or asking for an exception, and no customer is ever told a bot is a person.

Each skill is one named method or one artifact, and ends with the decision a named person makes. It works from what you paste, with no connector to install.

Nothing in the pack grades, ranks or profiles an agent or a customer. Replies, tickets, processes and the service get scored, people do not.

Download all 32 skills

One zip: ready-to-install skill zips, readable SKILL.md files, and the evidence notes behind every method. Free, no signup. The same 32 skills live in our open repo, if you would rather read them before you install them.

Download the zip Browse on GitHub

Install in Claude Code

Two lines, and every skill in the pack loads at once.

/plugin marketplace add polar-bear-org/claude-skills
/plugin install ai-for-customer-service-pack@polar-bear-skills

Using Claude on the web instead? Download the zip above and upload each skill from its install folder under Customize → Skills.

02The catalog

The 32 skills you get

The set follows the work of the desk, in eight parts: hard conversations, workload and staffing, roles and metrics, escalations and incidents, learning from tickets, answers and knowledge, service design, and AI and bots.

1 · Hard Conversations

Abusive Customer Policy

Use when: Customers yell or threaten and no rule lets the agent end the contact
Output: An abusive contact policy: warning, final warning and end-contact steps, a script for each step by channel, a supervisor backup rule with a time limit, and an incident log

De-escalation Playbook

Use when: An angry customer is on the line and the agent does not know what to say next
Output: Phone and chat steps, phrases to use and phrases to avoid, the “I want your manager” path, and a handoff note so the customer does not repeat themselves

Service Recovery Plan

Use when: We made a wrong promise or a late delivery and must admit it honestly
Output: An owned-mistake reply, a fix and follow-up plan on two tracks, a gesture within agreed limits, and an apology letter

Complaint Handling Procedure

Use when: A formal complaint arrives and the answer depends on who picks it up
Output: Receive, acknowledge, investigate, answer, close and learn as steps, with the acknowledgement and outcome letters and a complaint log

Refund and Exception Policy

Use when: You enforce the rule, get yelled at, then a manager grants the exception anyway
Output: Public refund wording, a decision-rights table of who approves what up to what value, a precedent log, a never-do list, and kind ways to say no

2 · Workload and Staffing

Workload and Recovery Rules

Use when: The team is burning out and nothing anyone does ever counts
Output: An occupancy cap, breaks between hard contacts, recovery time after abuse, cover and shift-end rules, and a team check against six stress areas

Erlang C Staffing Plan

Use when: Tickets doubled, reply times tripled and leadership wants proof before hiring
Output: A volume forecast by interval, agents needed at a target service level, occupancy and shrinkage, workload maths for email and chat, and a one-page case for more hands

Backlog Recovery Plan

Use when: The queue grows every day and the oldest tickets are the angriest
Output: Triage by age and risk, a bulk-reply and merge plan, a pause list, and a daily burn-down

Shift Handover Template

Use when: You cannot take a holiday because everything is tied to you
Output: Open tickets in SBAR form with the owner and the promise made, who talks to each customer, and a holiday cover sheet

3 · Roles, Metrics and Coaching

RACI Matrix

Use when: Your job has become the dumping ground for everything nobody owns
Output: Who owns what across support, success, sales, product and engineering, the gaps and double owners flagged, and a rule for new asks

Support Metrics Scorecard

Use when: The metrics punish the wrong person for another team's delay
Output: A metric set that separates closed from resolved, first contact resolution paired with reopen rate, an SLA clock owner per stage, and what each number cannot tell you

QA Scorecard

Use when: Coaching arrives days after the call and agents already feel watched
Output: A reply rubric — accuracy, policy, clarity, tone, next step — a sample plan, a calibration session, and same-day coaching notes about replies

Customer Service Training Plan

Use when: New agents get two weeks of slides, then live calls, then blame
Output: A first-weeks ramp built on practice, a shadow and reverse-shadow schedule, a go-solo checklist based on tasks, and a check that training changed the work

Customer Service Role Play

Use when: You have no time to rehearse difficult customer conversations
Output: A scenario bank by contact type, Claude playing the customer, debrief questions, and a practice log for the team

4 · Escalations and Incidents

Escalation Matrix

Use when: Nobody knows who decides, so every hard ticket lands on the head of support
Output: Support tiers with their entry criteria, an impact and urgency priority grid, triggers and target times, and the information each route needs before a ticket moves

SLA and OLA Template

Use when: Breaches caused by another team get reported against support
Output: Customer targets by priority and channel, internal OLAs with engineering, product and billing, breach rules, and a named clock owner at every stage

Bug Report Template

Use when: You escalate a ticket and it sits because engineering cannot act on it
Output: Steps to reproduce, expected and actual result, impact and customers affected, urgency, a workaround, and what the customer was told

Release Readiness Brief

Use when: Product ships changes without telling support and confused tickets flood in
Output: A change table, the questions customers will ask, day-one saved replies and article updates, launch contacts, and a go or hold check

Incident Communication Plan

Use when: An outage with no ETA and every customer wants an answer now
Output: A first notice, an update cadence that always gives the next-update time, no-ETA wording, an all-clear, a blameless closing note, and an agent brief

5 · Learning from Tickets

CSAT Survey

Use when: A bad rating for the customer's own mistake gets counted against the agent
Output: A short post-ticket survey, a cause-coded comment sheet, and a monthly summary that names causes, not agents

Ticket Taxonomy

Use when: Repeated tickets about the same issue are a pattern nobody documents
Output: A two-level, reason-based tag tree with definitions and examples, a one-page tagging guide, and a retire list for dead tags

5 Whys Root Cause Analysis

Use when: The same problem keeps coming back and product never hears it
Output: A Pareto table of contact drivers, a 5 Whys chain per driver that stops at a fixable process, and the asks for product with owners and dates

NPS Survey

Use when: Leadership asks what customers think of us overall, not of one ticket
Output: A relationship survey plan with its follow-up question, a close-the-loop rule where a person contacts detractors, and a cause table split into what support can and cannot move

6 · Answers and Knowledge

Canned Responses Library

Use when: You type the same answer again and again because it never reaches the docs
Output: Saved replies with personal slots, naming rules, an owner and a review date for each reply, and a retire list

Knowledge Base Article

Use when: Seniors become human search engines and the answer is buried
Output: An article from a solved ticket — the issue in the customer's words, environment, resolution, cause — with an article state, a gap list from failed searches, and a review cadence

Customer Service Policy

Use when: Every agent gives a different answer to the same question
Output: One page per topic — hours, channels, response promises, tone, refunds pointer, privacy basics — a change log, and a “what we never say” list

7 · Service Design

Customer Journey Map

Use when: Customers do not read, then contact us furious, five times
Output: Phases, actions, thoughts and feelings built from real tickets, the contact points where customers get confused and write in, and rewrites of the messages that cause it

Customer Effort Score

Use when: One problem takes five contacts and three transfers to solve
Output: The effort question and where to ask it, the effort drivers counted from tickets and comments — repeat contacts, transfers, channel switching — and a fix list with owners

Service Blueprint

Use when: Support takes the heat for handoffs the customer never sees
Output: Frontstage and backstage actions, support processes, the line of visibility, and the fail points and wait points, each with an owner

8 · AI and Bots, Safely

Chatbot Handoff Rules

Use when: The bot loops customers on cancellations with no human exit
Output: A bot scope table, handoff triggers with the context packet the agent receives, the disclosure line, and a loop test script

Self-Service Deflection Plan

Use when: Bots take the easy tickets and the hard remainder lands on an unchanged team
Output: A candidate question list, resolved versus abandoned measures instead of a deflection rate, and a second-line restaffing check

AI Use Policy

Use when: Leadership watches who uses AI and the team is unsure what AI is for
Output: A list of useful AI tasks with their risks, customer-data and send rules, the drafts a person must send, disclosure wording, and a review log

03How to use it

Pick the workflow that matches your week

No fixed order. Bring one real thing, a chat log or a week of tickets, and open the skill that matches what hurts this week.

Handle the upset customer

An upset or abusive customer, and nobody has a script.

Abusive Customer Policy
De-escalation Playbook
Service Recovery Plan
Complaint Handling Procedure

Carry the queue

The queue is growing and the team behind it is stretched.

Workload and Recovery Rules
Erlang C Staffing Plan
Backlog Recovery Plan
Shift Handover Template

Settle who owns it

A hard ticket crosses into another team and stalls.

Escalation Matrix
SLA and OLA Template
Bug Report Template

Learn from the tickets

The same answer keeps being retyped.

Ticket Taxonomy
5 Whys Root Cause Analysis
Canned Responses Library
Knowledge Base Article

Add a bot safely

You want to hand the easy questions to a bot, and need to know which ones they are.

Ticket Taxonomy
Chatbot Handoff Rules
Self-Service Deflection Plan

04Setup guide

Install it in five minutes

In Claude Code · two lines

/plugin marketplace add polar-bear-org/claude-skills
/plugin install ai-for-customer-service-pack@polar-bear-skills

In Claude.ai or Claude Desktop · seven clicks

Download the pack, then open Settings
Unzip the pack: its skills folder holds all 32 skills. In Claude, click your name at the bottom left, then Settings.
Download the zip
Open Skills and click Add
Under Customize, choose Skills. Click Add, then Upload a skill.
Drop in a skill file
Drag the skill's file into the box, or click to browse. You can add several at once.
Pick the skill from the pack
In the pack folder, open skills, then the skill you want, and select its SKILL.md — cs-de-escalation-playbook is a good first one.
Check the preview and upload
Claude shows the skill's name and what it does. Click Upload.
Make sure it is switched on
The skill opens on its own page. Its toggle should be on.
Try it in a new chat
Type / and the skill's name, then say what you need.

Then try one

Run cs-de-escalation-playbook on this chat log: [paste the anonymised log here]

Run cs-ticket-taxonomy on this week's tickets: [paste the export here]

Run cs-refund-exception-policy. The refund policy we have today: [paste it here]

Keep customer names and personal data out of it: anonymise the ticket first, and the skill asks for nothing it does not need.

Lantern for support leads

Turn your customer conversations into posts customers find useful

Lantern drafts a week of posts from your notes and call transcripts, in your voice. You review them and publish the ones you like.

100 free credits, about ten posts. No card needed.

Try for free

05Quick reference

Where to start

Your situation	Skill to run
An angry customer is on the line and nobody has the words	De-escalation Playbook
A customer threatened an agent and no rule lets them end it	Abusive Customer Policy
A manager keeps overriding the refund you just refused	Refund and Exception Policy
Tickets doubled and leadership wants proof before hiring	Erlang C Staffing Plan
The queue grows every day and the oldest tickets are the angriest	Backlog Recovery Plan
Every hard ticket lands on the head of support	Escalation Matrix
Another team's delay is reported as a support breach	SLA and OLA Template
Engineering keeps bouncing your escalations	Bug Report Template
An outage with no ETA and every customer wants an answer	Incident Communication Plan
The same tickets come back and product never hears it	5 Whys Root Cause Analysis
The bot loops people who want to cancel	Chatbot Handoff Rules

06Standards

The quality bar

Every skill in the pack holds the same standard, the one we hold when we run discovery ourselves:

Claude drafts and routes; a person answers anyone who is upset, at risk or asking for an exception, and no customer is ever told a bot is a person
One named method or one artifact per skill, attributed to its originator through a public source
Works from what you paste — a ticket, a policy, an export — and no connector is required
Nothing grades, ranks or profiles an agent or a customer: replies, tickets, processes and the service get scored, and team data suppresses small groups
No invented numbers: targets, thresholds and limits are yours to set, and every example is marked as an example
Legal and regulatory points — refunds, abuse, AI disclosure — end with “check with a qualified adviser”
Every output ends with the decision a named person makes, and by when

07FAQ

Questions people ask

What is in the AI for Customer Service pack?

32 Claude skills that follow a support desk in eight parts: hard conversations, workload and staffing, roles and metrics, escalations and incidents, learning from tickets, answers and knowledge, service design, and AI and bots. Each skill is one named method or one artifact.

How do I install these Claude skills?

In Claude Code, two lines install all 32 at once. In Claude.ai or Claude Desktop, download the zip, open Settings, Skills, Add, and upload the skills you want. Either way it takes about five minutes.

Do I need Claude Code to use them?

No. The skills work in Claude.ai, Claude Desktop and Claude Code. In the app you upload them yourself; in Claude Code one command installs the whole pack.

Do the skills work with ChatGPT or other assistants?

They are built as Claude Skills, and installing them is a Claude feature. Each one is a plain Markdown file, so you can read it and reuse the method elsewhere, but it will not load and trigger by itself outside Claude.

Will a bot answer our upset customers?

No. Claude drafts and routes. A person answers anyone who is upset, at risk or asking for an exception, and no customer is ever told a bot is a person. Nothing in the pack grades, ranks or profiles an agent or a customer.

Is the pack free?

Yes. It is free to use inside your company and in client work, and not for resale. There is no signup: the download and the install command are on this page.

08Who made this

Lantern, by Polar Bear

These skills were written by Polar Bear, a people ops consultancy that runs its own company on Claude. The pack is free, and the same skills are open on GitHub.

Lantern is Polar Bear's content workspace. It turns your notes, documents and call transcripts into drafts for LinkedIn and other networks. You review them and publish the ones you like.