Global Groups for effective ticket management - trial proposal

Important: watch the video!

Please watch the video before commenting as it explains this proposal in more detail including justifications for the design.

Link to Slides for the video

Background

Background Details

As the Support team grows we evolve how we organise ourselves to effectively manage support tickets.

Team responsibilities for managing support tickets involve:

  1. Sending good quality first replies in time to meet the SLA
  2. Sending good quality, timely "next" replies the move tickets toward resolution
  3. Helping with tickets for which the owner is unavailable (e.g. out sick)
  4. Collaborating with ticket owners to help move difficult tickets forward

Recognizing that SE stress was high and increasing, and that we were neither achieving SLA targets nor increasing collaboration, we made an MVC aimed at relieving stress and not negatively impacting SLA: we removed Crew and created two global views - FRT and Handover Needed.

This issue presents the proposed next iteration for global ticket handling which we believe sets us up for long term success.

Problem Statement

The current system (a global FRT view and regional Handover Needed views) is not well designed to achieve our SLA and ticket resolution goals:

  1. Although stress has come down, unnecessary stressors remain:
    1. Collaboration is not built into the system
      • NOTE: The "Needs Collaboration" view and processes do help, and our proposal includes keeping those. Many thanks to Greg for creating the "Needs Collaboration" system
    2. It can be very hard to find other SEs to work tickets when the owner is absent, planned or unplanned
    3. Handing over tickets between regions is not reliable (backlog of tickets in some 'handover needed' views)
  2. We are still not meeting our FRT SLA achievement KPI
  3. Many customers are not receiving timely "next" replies on their tickets, which has led to escalations in which the customer says their ticket is being ignored

Proposal

Process

  1. Create global groups of approximately 15 SEs

    1. 4 or 5 SEs per region
    2. Balance groups by tenure, role and focus areas

  2. Each group gets a public view in Zendesk:

    Example Image

    image

    1. New tickets are distributed evenly, "round robin", to the groups. At current volume each group would get about 20 tickets per working day.
    2. Each group is responsible for meeting the SLA on each ticket and resolving each ticket.
    3. SEs will assign themselves to new tickets when they make the first response. But assigned tickets stay visible in the group views to help with collaboration and reduce burden of handover for PTO.
    4. Everyone can see all of the group views and therefore can see and help with all tickets.

  3. Each group gets a channel in Slack:

    Example Image image
    • Each group may use its Slack channel to self-organize and to coordinate for ticket success: discuss availability, inter-regional handovers, pairing, etc.)

Trial

Rather than creating a change for the whole team so soon after the prior changes, we would like to run a trial with one group. For this we are seeking volunteers who are enthusiastic about trying the Global Groups process:

Expectations of Participants:

  • Participants will be expected to work as part of a Global Group through the duration of the trial
  • Participants will be expected to follow the trial's documented workflow
  • Participants will be expected to contribute feedback, ideas and suggestions actively, as we are planning to iterate during the trial and as the results of the trial will determine if this idea will work at a full team scale.

Interested in volunteering?

Fill out this very short form by 2021-12-01 (Wednesday)!

Trial start and end date

2021-12-06 to 2022-01-31 (To be confirmed)

DRIs

Required Resources

  1. Volunteers for trial
  2. Zendesk view changes
  3. New Slack channel
  4. Documentation on how to operate
  5. Reports to measure success
  6. Survey to measure and compare work related stress levels

Potential Roadblocks / Things to consider

  1. Not everyone wants change
    1. Trial volunteers will give indication of enthusiasm for the proposal
    2. Trial will give real life experience of what it feels like
  2. Each group does all types of tickets - what if no one with expertise in an area is available?
    1. Self-organise - ask for help and find subject matter experts (SMEs) from outside of their group
    2. Use 'Needs Collaboration' view

Desired Outcome

What does success look like and how do we measure it? (Success Criteria)

  1. SEs report greater work related happiness and less stress than the global average
  2. FRT SLA achievement is equal to or better than that of the rest of the global team
  3. SSAT is equal to or better than that of the rest of the global team
  4. Customer wait time (time that tickets are in "Open") on tickets within the trial is less than that of tickets outside the trial

Where should feedback go?

On this issue

Edited by Tom Atkins