Daily Best Practices

The purpose of this blog is to provide simple guidance on the paramount steps that need to be taken on a day to day basis to keep up with the customer service requirements and to maintain uninterrupted outage of supporting end-user queries and issues. On a general basis most support teams usually have a group of people who are working to upkeep the application being used by several. The support provided and catered to varies vastly but majorly being divided into two main segments i.e. Back-end support and Front-end support.

Communication: One of the top essential requirements for a support cell to keep in mind is communication, as largely all the work done can be success or a failure with this key activity. To help explain this better keep reading and try to visualize scenarios where communication would be a must – playing the role of a mother in all aspects.

Team involvement: A support team comprises of more than one member in all cases, very rarely it would be that only a single person would be handling it end to end. Plenty of reasons to justify the fact are mentioned below:

• Disruption of resolution process, due to unavailability of the solo involvement
• Unable to provide support in all time zones
• Lesser bandwidth to provide support in peak hours
• No Segregation of Duties (SoD), would be fulfilled if there are several requirements to be targeted

Due to the above factors it is a must to involve more resources rather than single handling the support activity.

Standardization: Follow as much standardization as possible, because a group comprising of many members will bring inconsistency which will not be appreciated by the customers. It would also lead to confusion and mis-communication. By utilizing certain templates or standard processes this can be easily set in place by the team.

Classification and Prioritization: Most imperative job of a person involved in providing customer service is to classify the tickets and prioritize them. Failing to do would result in deadlines not being met. On the other hand this ensure that  there would be clarity within the team as to what needs to be given more attention to. Also by classifying the ticket/request if the team is divided into logical groups for example if the ticket is been labeled as a Problem Ticket it would be passed on then a team that would be handling on such tickets and not of any type. In this manner there is no conflict in roles.

Status: We experience the importance of this in our regular life, wanting to know the latest update of pending activities and tasks pending on someone. Same concept applies to tickets raised – wherein the end users are always eager to know how long it would take to get all the work completed. Even there are many parties and teams involved so if the status is not correctly updated / reflected it may affect the quality of service drastically. To add another point regarding status is to have a pre-decided date to organize a meeting and discuss the overall status of the support line either with the key end users/owner to explain in detail the trend and highlight any roadblocks if any. In this way it is ensured that the involved people are aware about high-level news important to them.

Knowledge base: Creating a knowledge base is a good practice to incorporate if possible; as it helps the team members/newbie’s to look out for already existing solutions or grab examples out of it. Also helps in having a solution at hand and reduces wastage of time in analyzing the already persistent problem.

Simplicity: Always make it a point to believe that the end user has no knowledge and explain the solution or the workaround in simple flow and if there is a huge content ensure its properly sliced and diced for better communication.

To sum up the above points – try inculcating simple and standard process to provide support to end users. This would benefit all and keep the customer content, end to end the flow to assist the application will be smoother.

About Author:

Dimpy Thurakhia is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at dimpy.t@spluspl.com