PROBLEM MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY

Customer Care Resources and Escalations

From an engineering perspective the customer support teams should have a standard set of resources provided to them by engineering. These resources should not only help them proactively know about customer issues but also be able to work around them when possible. The goal is to solve on first contact to make happy customers and minimize support costs. When looking to measure the efficiency of this process, make sure to focus your metrics around end customer satisfaction.

Knowledge

Knowledge is power in the hands of your customer care teams. With this knowledge they will not need to go to engineering.

Provide a set of known problems and how to support them from all of your data sources:
- Dynamically generate a list of known open issues which are waiting for development from your tracker
- Pull your known defect list from QA production findings
Generate instant notifications when deployments go out, so support teams know what has just been fixed / changed
Provide work arounds to help customers stay functional.
Have honest and tough calls with customers when there are delays or problems will not be fixed.

tooling

Empower your support teams with the visibility they need into the backend of production systems to let them see the issues themselves.

Proper tooling for support teams should be planned and designed to fit the needs of support.
Reduce the number of resources you need for support by using the right tooling to lower response times.
There is an array of 3rd party tools on the market today which make getting this information to support teams easier than ever before.
Provide your support teams with access to your internal status pages.

training

Staying abreast of current production issues allows your front end support teams to be knowledgeable of issues as customer call in, reducing support times.

Daily updates on new issues helps to ensure the latest issues are fresh in their minds.
Make sure your support teams are trained on how to be a customer advocate.

Engineer Problem Triage

In order to be successful, accurate, and quick at triage of issues, engineers (Tier 3) need the right process, tooling, and support. Through creation of an enforced process and gathering of metrics, you can ensure a culture of continual improvement to always serve your internal support customers better.

team

Combining the right skillsets, process, and workload will ensure successful problem triage.

Those who triage customer issues should have a balanced workload of triage and development issues.
Ensure you have a balanced team of engineers from a skillset perspective and ensure they know how to effectively triage.
When hiring make sure you are looking for engineers that have the right mindset to be positively challenged by problems.
Continuing education is key to looking at problems from new angles and utilizing new technology to solve old problems.
Reinforce root cause solutions not quick and easy repetitive solutions.

resources

Providing the right tooling created internally and from 3rd party vendors ensures efficient and quick triage.

When needing to work around issues make sure they are quick and do not become part of daily operations.
Capture the right data during problem entry to ensure engineers know which issues to triage first.
When providing solutions to internal customers make sure you are considering the lowest operational and development costs.
To enable faster solving of all known internal issues, adopt a culture of knowledge sharing.
Knowledge can become siloed, do what you can to ensure this does not happen with cross training and knowledge.

Development Escalations

Involvement of development / product / architecture should come as a last resort when all other options have been exhausted. Involvement of other teams should be a structured exercise each time to ensure distractions are minimized. When issues do need to have a fix developed, the information we provide can speed or slow the development process.

Developer

Minimizing distractions to development is key.

Developers should be held accountable for issues in production systems, however with legacy systems there are some caveats which necessitate traditional style approaches to triage.
When engaging developers make sure there is a structured process on how to contact them and expectations on what assistance they will provide.
Knowing who to contact in development when looking at customer problems can cut down on times to triage.

product

Product is the gatekeeper of which issues will get fixed. Ensure they have what they need for data driven decision making.

Define which data points your business cares most about when communicating priority of a customer issue.
Find and define the costs of your internal operational time sinks to be corrected by development.
Report on the operational costs of internal manual workarounds so they can be prioritized for development.