Kateryna Babenko
Kateryna Babenko is a customer service and support operations practitioner, strategist, and writer. She works at the intersection of customer service, product support, business operations, and AI, examining how support teams work, how software shapes their work, and how companies can use customer insights to make better operational and product decisions.
Over six years, she has worked across internal employee support, e-commerce customer service, B2B support, product support, systems implementation, data analysis, and independent consulting. Her experience includes software implementation, support operations analysis, automation, and platform selection for the Government of Curaçao. She approaches customer service from the perspective of someone who has worked inside support operations, implemented the systems behind them, analysed their data, and advised businesses on improving them.
Kateryna also runs a paid evaluation programme for customer experience and support software. She tests products hands-on against her AI Vendor Scorecard, records product walkthroughs, evaluates their capabilities and limitations, and identifies the types of support teams and use cases for which they are best suited. She publishes clearly labelled paid partnership content for an audience of customer support leaders, CX professionals, and founders. Her evaluations focus on how products work in practice, not simply on how vendors describe them.
Her work is grounded in a central belief. Customer service data is currency. Support is one of the few business functions that interacts continuously with customers while seeing the consequences of decisions made across multiple departments. Every conversation can reveal something about product usability, customer expectations, broken processes, unmet promises, or opportunities to improve the business.
Yet support is often treated as a cost centre rather than a source of business intelligence. Its people are expected to absorb the consequences of decisions made elsewhere, work around inadequate systems, and resolve problems without necessarily having the influence to prevent them. The value of their knowledge is recognised in principle but too rarely reflected in how companies make decisions.
Kateryna writes about this gap and how AI is changing it. Her work explores which customer conversations technology can eliminate, which require human judgement, how AI changes the work of support teams, and how businesses can turn customer contact into better products and operations. She is particularly interested in the practical realities of adopting AI and agentic systems in customer service, beyond the promises made by software vendors.
In 2026, she delivered a keynote at Dixa Connect built around the idea that customer service data is currency. Her work connects hands-on operational experience with independent analysis of the software, systems, and business decisions shaping the future of customer support.
For consulting, software evaluations or speaking, reach out to kateryna@rigel.studio.