Improve processes for emergency support cases in US Federal
Request for comments
Need
The emergency ticket submission process is confusing. Customers in an emergency are likely to forget that an emergency ticket requires an email and cannot be submitted via the portal. Given that customers submit all other tickets via the portal, this alternative approach is often forgotten not followed, thereby resulting in incorrectly prioritized tickets as well as delays in submitting a correctly prioritized ticket.
Approach
- Create a separate form on the Federal support portal that can be used to file new emergency cases directly via the support portal.
- Create and document the process for TAMs to elevate an existing case up to the emergency level
Benefit
- Maintains a single medium for filing a case at any priority level
- Submitting an emergency case via email is confusing and error prone, particularly at critical moments for a customer. Filing via the form avoids those pitfalls
- It's possible to gather better data via the form than via email submissions which can help the on-call engineer appropriately triage the issue
- A TAM may be contacted by their customer prior to support noticing a customer down submission that was filed at a less urgent priority and they can then elevate it to an emergency more efficiently
Competition / Alternatives
- This was attempted in global previously (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/-/issues/3252) via the use of severity 1 selection on the existing forms
Mock-up of the form:
Disclaimer: this form is being trialed by support and may be disabled/removed at any point.
If you have an emergency in the future and this form is unavailable, please follow the [standard process for engaging emergency support](https://about.gitlab.com/support/#how-to-trigger-emergency-support) by sending a new email (do not CC or forward) to the address provided to you with your subscription.
Emergency Case Submission
criteria for GitLab emergency support defined here will be re-assessed at the relevant impact severity and a call will not be offered.
This form is only to be used to report production down incidents. Any cases submitted using this form that do not fit theOptional information
Please provide as much information as possible to allow our team to come into the emergency situation with the most context and expertise.
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