Add Stages to GitLab Customer Lifecycle (Implementation/Live)
We talked about this in the Senior Support Meeting and we noticed that a lot of times we find customers in two states:
-
Implementation
- They are new to GitLab
- They are usually "configuring for the first time"
- They run into bugs/edge-cases/documentation errors
- They may need to make architecture changes based on their use case.
-
Live
- They have a stable architecture
- Their Admins have been exposed to the basic components of GitLab (Unicorn/Redis/Sidekiq/Postgres)
- They have active users, and have "adopted" GitLab
By defining these two states we can start to adjust our approach to supporting customers in each phase:
-
NEW IDEA Implementation Stage:
- A Support Engineer is set up as a "hawk" to monitor the incoming tickets from that account. If a ticket comes in, that SE will engage and potentially submit an MR to fix the documentation or bug/regression. This will allow the customer to feel heard and extremely supported as they adopt the product.
- We should expect to be "high touch" during this phase, and by assigning SEs to focus on the account, we will have maximum context and speed.
- This SE may also partner with IEs/SAs and TAMs to help set up the account for success.
-
Live Stage:
- Continue as normal with Hot queues so that we can leverage a global team, and exposure to problems, and a normal queuing mechanism.
As a First iteration this will probably only be applied to Premium Accounts with TAMS but we can always expand.
Thoughts?