Responsibilities, Expectations, & Work on the L&R Queue in Zendesk
The customer portal intersects with Support, Billing, Sales, and Product primarily.
Tickets come into the L&R queue in Zendesk generally three ways, generally prioritized as low:
by filling out the form on the Renewals page
As the License and Renewals (L&R) Queue is a queue of Zendesk tickets outside of the scope of support to the GitLab product, it's handled by the Business Systems Specialist (BSS) in order to take control of a pain point that touches many departments, analyze the tickets, and identify and execute on solutions with the appropriate departments.
The BSS works closely with the Support team since they use the same tool and their work often overlaps.
When the BSS is in off hours, Sales will often search the L&R queue and take tickets relating to IACV.
The BSS also can reach out to Support members for help and subject matter expertise.
Expectations for BSS:
Meet first SLA with an initial response to the customer.
Passing to Sales: Pass tickets relating to IACV to Sales via cc to Sales in reply to ticket which sends an email to both customer and account owner. If an account is associated with the ticket, there's a ticket object in SFDC.
It's then Sales's responsibility to continue the customer interaction and the BSS closes the Zendesk ticket.
Passing to Sales: If a ticket comes in and the BSS is unable to determine the account owner or the inquiry is related to new business, the BSS reaches out to the SFDC chatter group ZD-newbusiness where the SDR Regional leads for EMEA, APAC and AMER/LATAM provide an answer.
Then the BSS cc's that person on the ticket and closes in Zendesk.
Regional Leads for SDRs:
AMER/LATAM - Mona Elliot
APAC - Jay Thomas-Burrows
EMEA - Elsje Smart
Passing to Billing: The mechanism to pass tickets to the Billing team is to open the ticket, then change the field form from the value Upgrades, Renewals & AR (refunds) to Accounts Receivable/Refunds.
This puts the ticket into the Billing Team's queue which they then manage.
If you need to draw attention to a ticket in the L&R queue, share the link in the slack channel #support_fulfillment
Common Customer Inquiries
Tickets are first triaged by the BSS and then sometimes passed to Sales, .com Support, or Billing; Complete list of ticket categories and subcategories (internal documentation)
Handled by Business Systems Specialist:
User wants to trial a plan other than Gold on GitLab.com (BSS first triages as appropriate, then passes to .com Support Internal Issue
User receives an error during the purchasing process within the customers portal, initially triaged by BSS, then if needed Fulfillment
User wants the red renewal approaching banner message in their Self-Managed system removed, customer needs to upload working license
User doesn't know the steps to purchase a GitLab.com subscription
User doesn't see their group during purchase process, they need to create their group or associate their GitLab.com account with their portal account. If there's an error, send to .com Support
User doesn't understand how true-up works
Instructions for activating the license key
User wants to know when they will receive the license key
User doesn't renew paid Self-Managed plan, what happens to the license and features, BSS triages with initial explanation and also cc's Sales
A customer reports problems when registering their license key
These inquiries get routed to Sales:
User reports an inability to upgrade from one paid plan to another, cc Account Owner on reply to customer + internal note asking BSS to let BSS know they got it and can close case
User is on a trial and wants to purchase a paid plan, cc Account Owner on reply to customer + internal note asking BSS to let BSS know they got it and can close case
Customer wants to pay by anything other than a credit card, cc Account Owner on reply to customer + internal note asking BSS to let BSS know they got it and can close case
These inquiries get routed to .com Support:
User wants to trial a plan other than Gold on GitLab.com (BSS first triages as appropriate, then passes to .com Support Internal Issue
When a closed won opportunity (with EULA set to YES) is created in SFDC, a license key will be generated once a click through EULA is accepted by the customer.