The Support team use one of two systems to ensure tickets get replies within the Service Level Objective we have with our customers:
This is a rotating role, where someone is "on point" weekly (Monday to Friday), to make sure:
First Response Time Hawks directly drive achievement in our Service Level Agreement KPI.
Other Request
. This is usually because the ticket was created by email. Note that a form change results in an auto-reply for tickets that don't have an org associated yet. Hence, it is recommended to first associate the user with an appropriate org and then change the form to the most relevant form type and fill in additional metadata where possible.#support_team_chat
#support_self-managed
General::Job Application Questions
for hiring-specific questions in Zendesk.You can track your progress and see global results on this Zendesk Explore Dashboard
The SLA Hawk is a rotating role that you will carry out for one week at a time (Monday to Friday). You can view the rotations in PagerDuty
The SLA Hawk is responsible for ensuring that action is taken on the 'most breached' and 'next to breach' tickets in order to meet our SLAs and so that difficult tickets are not ignored. NOTE: It is the responsibility of all Support team members to ensure customer tickets are responded to within our SLA times. The SLA Hawk is not expected to reply to tickets themselves - your job is to find team members to help get a reply out (see below for more info)
The SLA Hawk should also perform a queue tidy up:
SLA Hawks drive achievement via our KPIs for Service Level Agreement KPI and Customer Satisfaction by making sure our customers are updated in a timely manner.
#support-self-managed
and ping them asking if they are able to take a look. We've adopted a convention of prefixing your message in Slack with [SLAH]
so that folks know you're currently in that role.@support-team-<region>
) about the ticket. Once you have one or two volunteers, let the team know the ticket is taken care of via the thread.[SLAH]
, this lets people know that you've been given the role to find people to help. We assume positive intent and the team knows that this is the job of the SLA Hawk.That's great, I'll mark the ticket solved.
and so on. It improves the signal:noise ratio and someone has to write that reply.You can see how we're doing on this Zendesk Explore Dashboard.
Look a the 'Self Managed NRT SLA achieved charts' for this week and last week. We're aiming for 85% achievement. If we can get to 95% that would be awesome! The 'this week' chart updates hourly.
The Support Response Crew replaces SLA Hawk and FRT Hawk to help us meet our service level objectives and to ensure customers get timely replies. The original issue where the idea was proposed describes the reasons for introducing a new system. It is currently running in EMEA (AMER to trial the system from 2020-11-30).
Crew Responsibilities:
The response crew does not work with Licensing and Subscription tickets. Support Engineers focused 100% on those tickets are not part of the response crew rotation.
#support_response-crew
Slack channelWork with your crew to prevent breaches:
:eyes:
emoji reaction to the bot message to show you're looking at a ticket (you can remove this if you've looked and don't know how to reply - though ideally at this point start a thread and ask your crew to collaborate with you):white_check_mark:
emoji reaction to the bot message when you've replied to the ticket so the rest of your crew knows that it's been taken care of.SM with SLA
and .com with SLA
views to get ahead of imminent breaches. Work in Zendesk from the top of these views - there's no need to wait for the bot! Try to anticipate future busy periods by looking at the time to next breach in Zendesk and getting replies out before the bot alert the channel.How to reply to tickets while in the crew:
Currently the crew's main focus is to prevent SLA breaches. The whole team are responsible for replying to new tickets. If a new ticket is close to breaching then the response crew will need to reply:
The crew is responsible for Triaging tickets to make sure they have:
Other Request
. This is usually because the ticket was created by email. Note that a form change results in an auto-reply for tickets that don't have an org associated yet. Hence, it is recommended to first associate the user with an appropriate org and then change the form to the most relevant form type and fill in additional metadata where possible.Chat with your crew and work on these tickets when there are no imminent breaches and you have some spare capacity.
You are responsible for collaborating with your crew. This is a key part of your crew day. Here's how you can do that:
These responsibilities are not optional! You are expected to communicate and collaborate on your crew day.
Be available in the channel during your normal office hours - you don't have to be there for all 8 hours - make sure to be available for 'most of your day' and communicate with the rest of the crew in Slack or the Zoom room for some of the time.
It's OK if you need to go to another call for an hour or head out for your lunch break etc. By being a crew of several people there will usually be someone available. Keep the crew updated with your availability.
If you're in the East of your region consider being available early in your day to handover from the West of the previous region. If you're in the West of your region, consider being available towards the end of your day to handover to the next region.
If you notice that several people are out, please contact a manager and ask them to request volunteers to help out.
See 'EMEA Crew Schedule' below.
Each region will organize the crew schedule to fit the needs of their region.
There will be a calendar entry in your calendar
Please follow these steps in order:
The schedule is managed and updated by EMEA Support Managers.
We use a Google Calendar to schedule events, a spreadsheet to track and plan and Zapier to glue those together:
The calendar and sheet are owned by techsupport@gitlab.com
google account. Login details for this account and Zapier are in 1Password team vaults.
How it works:
Roation 1
with 5 crewsFor people onboarding: You'll be added to the calendar during your third or fourth week at GitLab. While you're still onboarding don't worry about crew work - but please feel free to join in to help learning as soon as you feel ready.
Weekly review by managers:
The Support Response Crew Bot sends reminders to the crew in Slack each morning.
You can see how we're doing on this Zendesk Explore Dashboard.
Look at the '.com and Self Managed NRT SLA achieved charts' for this week and last week. We're aiming for 85% achievement. If we can get to 95% that would be awesome! The 'this week' chart updates hourly.