Integrating engineering within your customer support

Ticketing processes are easy to get in place as long your team size is small. But what happens when you need to involve more teams to your ticketing process in order to keep delivering a great support experience to your customers? 

What if your customer support team can’t solve a case by themselves and require help from one or several other teams to provide a resolution on the case? 

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Customer support teams are the first to answer and reply on cases submitted from your customers. They act as the first level of support, making sure customers receive a reply and a final resolution on their submitted case. 

The ticketing system is what adds structure to this process, every single submitted case from a customer receives a unique ticketing number. Making it easy to track tickets over various states during its complete lifecycle. 

But what if your customer support team can’t solve a case by themselves and require help from one or several other teams to provide a resolution on the case? 

There are often these cases which require technical teams to provide assistance to the customer support team to resolve cases. These teams that are typically included in an escalation process range from IT Operations (IT Ops), DevOps, SecOps to Engineering team consisting of Software Developers. 

Efficient escalation process with relevant data 

One of the most challenging parts when involving several teams in a ticketing process is to achieve an efficient process for the complete ticket lifecycle.

It is easy to put a new process in place, that later becomes a slow and cumbersome multi-step process which essentially impacts the customer experience negatively due to long response times. 

Four actions to help you plan your introduction of a ticketing system: 

• Initial data submitted should contain required field and minimum data to start working on the ticket 
• Plan for KPI (Key Performance Indicator) reports when building the process to easily analyze and track ticketing trends
• Communication between the involved teams should be streamlined within the ticketing process and allow conversations to happen naturally within it
• Align the ticketing process close to your teams and where they communicate today. Avoid forcing them away into an external system where team communication is not happening naturally.

Reduce noise and stay focused 

Within escalation processes there are teams who get involved which have a lot of important work on their plate already. Developers/Engineering, DevOps, IT Operations (ITOps) and other technical teams are groupings that naturally can become a part of a ticketing escalation process. 
All of these technical teams will naturally try to combine their daily work with anything that comes in as a case from an escalated ticket.

How do you keep a team of developers focused on their work, minimizing context switching and at the end reducing the noise from escalations? 

With Suptask there are clever ways to solve this using the structure of Slack channels and properly designed ticketing forms. 

Each ticket form can be reached from several channels but can only be remediated in one single channel where the responding team is. By creating a structure of several responding channels you can easily have the topics of submitted tickets isolated to its own channel. 

People from the team are then invited to the channel where the ticket they should focus on remediating shows up. 

Leading to less notifications inside of Slack, less noise in general and a much better focus. This is what contributes to the Developer Experience (DX), where products are built to further focus on those teams building and what they really need in their day-to-day work.

Team-to-team co-operation with instant communication

The time it takes to get a resolution on a ticket is directly impacting the customer satisfaction rate. With an accurate reply and a fast resolution time on a ticket, you directly impact the customer satisfaction in a positive way. 

Faster handling time on a ticket is a major factor that keeps your customers happy within the ticketing process. How the correlation looks with the handling time can sometimes be referred to as Cost per Ticket where MetricNet shares some great insights on this topic together with the variables building this up. 

One of the most critical parts of a fast resolution time is to push down the time it takes to handle escalations and to gain knowledge from each escalation to spread it within the team. 

Escalations will happen and the way you have structured the process is what will impact the customers satisfaction at the end. 

The number one phase you want to optimize for escalations is communication. 

By aligning your teams closer to each other and enabling instant communication, you will automatically have a naturally fast escalation process. 

Escalations often come down to sharing information, hence why communication of all details back and forth will be critical. 

When using Slack, your teams are already closely aligned. They can contact each other easily, there is a structure of channels for certain topics and the efficiency of threads helps communication flow within a channel. 

This is one of the main reasons why Suptask is built to provide a ticketing experience closely aligned with all of your teams directly on Slack.