Responding to Support Tickets: Internal and Customer-Facing Processes
Hi everyone,
I'm fairly new at a small technology company, serving as the Director of Customer Success. I've discovered a significant gap in our process for handling customer support tickets. I'd appreciate hearing how others manage the process from an internal perspective and from a customer-facing perspective.
Here's the situation:
Support for our legacy products has been managed a certain way that seems adequate for the type of product and the issues reported by customers. We recently launched a new product, and have another product in development, that serve a different customer segment and the impact of a problem, bug, or functionality failure can be more severe. The team that initially triages a support ticket can resolve most legacy product issues directly, but they cannot do so for the new products. Those problems must be handled by the developers (who report to the CTO).
There has been no definition of incident severity and no clear process for handling support tickets for the new products. I drafted a process that identifies 4 levels of severity, with examples for each, and the expected internal response/response time. For example, Severity Level 1, Critical: the ticket must be updated (within Jira) within 30 minutes with a status of In Progress/Requires Development and assigned to someone on the team. Basic stuff.
What's missing are the requirements for the assigned person(s) to provide status updates. Currently it's like a black hole and communication back to me, so I can update the customer, is lacking. Customers don't appreciate "we're working on it" for very long. Do any of you set parameters for this, by incident severity level? For example, for Sev 1 tickets initial troubleshooting update will be provided back to CS within 4 hours. I understand it takes time to investigate and every scenario can be different, but shouldn't there be some guidelines for accountability?