Define emergency support methodology on dedicated emergencies

Request for comments

Need

During emergency situations in which a dedicated customer is involved currently the following happens:

  • A customer reach GitLab support through an emergency
  • If not automated incident has been created by Incident.io for the dedicated tenant, the support engineer will raise awareness with the SRE's on dedicated and on the internal dedicated customer channel
  • Once the incident is raised the SREs will join their own bridge and start debugging the problem until fixed.
  • During this time the SE will be most likely on another bridge with the customer, and while its possible for the SE to watch metrics and search for logs, in some cases ultimately it will be until the SREs fix the problem that a resolution could be given.

This creates a situation in which the SE becomes a liaison between the customer and the SREs, mostly providing status updates, which on a high stakes situation could create customer dissatisfaction as the customer is not actively engaged with the team who is solving the problem at hand. At the same time in case of concurrent emergencies that SE is going to be involved on an incident mostly providing status updates while it could be engaged on solving other emergencies proactively. Furthermore, having a liaison between customer and SRE could in some situations lead to communications problems and confusion.

Approach

Given this scenario we should reconsider how we can eliminate the liaison between parties to provide direct communication between the customer and the engineers who are working on solve the problem for a better customer experience. For example perhaps the customer should join the SRE's incident Zoom call alongside the SE so that everyone in unison work without someone in the middle providing updates.

Benefit

Better customer satisfaction as they are actively engaged in the emergency with all the required personnel to give it resolution.

Competition / Alternatives

As an alternative perhaps more tools could be shared/created with ASEs to a particular Dedicated account to provide a more active approach on emergency situations for our customers.