This page is intended to provide general communication tips for the GitLab Support
Department. Anything related to communication useful for this department is
welcome here. It is meant to be an extension of the
GitLab Communication handbook page.
Examples:
How can a Support Engineer efficiently talk to other Support Engineers via
Slack, Zoom or e-mail?
How can a Support Engineer get the most out of their interaction with a
Technical Account Manager?
:idontknow: - when another Support Engineer is asking a question to which
you don't know the answer
:red_circle: - when another Support Engineer is asking for something and
you are unable to do it due to conflicts or time constraints, such as being
unable to cover someone else's on-call shift because you'll be unavailable
during the shift time
:eyes: - to signal that you are looking into the request. It serves as an
indication that someone is acting upon the request, and prevents duplication
of effort. If you were unable to answer the request you should remove the
:eyes: so other people know the request is not yet handled.
Note that it is better to send some signal, even though it might indicate that
you cannot help, than to ignore the message that has been sent. This helps the
person who started the thread as it prevents them from holding on to the hope
that someone will chime in and makes them focus on searching for help elsewhere.
Of course, whenever you can, share the idea you have in your mind no matter how
trivial you consider it to be, as you never know what can lead someone else in
the right direction.
Tickets
Whenever there is a discussion in Slack regarding a ticket, please remember to
add a link to the discussion as an internal note on the ticket. Because all
Slack posts are removed after 90 days, please either summarize the Slack
discussion in that internal note or, if it's not too long, simply paste it in.
These actions make it possible for others to use the information from the
discussion to help themselves to contribute to the ticket, or simply to learn
from it.
@mustread
The @must-read Slack bot transforms any important message into micro-task, so that no one will miss it. It also helps our team collect important messages, announcements, and links, and track who has read them.
@must-read helps to control all significant information no matter how many channels you have and how big is your team. You can easily check who has read the message and who has not. No more “Did you read it guys?” questions needed.
Use cases
Use it to send short important announcements for whole team or channel
Use it when your message is too small to become a task/card/issue but too important to be forgotten/lost/ignored
Bookmark important links for yourself or any member of your team
Send links to important news, tasks, meetings or support tickets
Use must-read messages as simple reminders
When you got notifications from Zendesk, Trello, Asana, JIRA, etc. that need more attention, simply start a thread and mention @must-read
Workflow
Here are some simple commands that you can
Mark any messages to track reactions of the team:
Mention @mustread and teammates (who must read) if you want to get their reaction.
Also you can use @channel or @here. I'll collect all these messages in follow-up list.
E.g. @must-read: example.net @user1 @user2
I'll add ✅ to this message. If somebody clicks on this reaction, it will mean they read it. When everyone has reacted you will see 📙.
Stealth mode:
If you add nobody but @mustread to any link (or 70+ chars of important text for your teammates) it will be must-read for everyone in the channel.
E.g. @must-read: example.net
or @must-read: some important text for a channel 70 or more characters long
Please refer to the help page for more information on different use cases.
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