Communication tips

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3. Support Team Handbook
4. Support Workflows
5. Communication tips

On this page

• Overview
  • Slack reactions
  • Tickets
  • @mustread
    • Use cases
    • Workflow

Overview

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:

1. How can a Support Engineer efficiently talk to other Support Engineers via Slack, Zoom or e-mail?
2. How can a Support Engineer get the most out of their interaction with a Customer Success Manager?

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Slack reactions

In addition to the :white_check_mark: emoji that is mentioned in General Guidelines for Communication at GitLab and Slack Workflows, consider utilizing the following emojis within Support Slack channels as well.

1. :idontknow: - when another Support Engineer is asking a question to which you don't know the answer
2. :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. Note: We should avoid using this emoji when responding to high priority requests (emergencies, customer escalations, STARs).
3. :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.

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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.

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@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 folks?” 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

1. 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.