Working on Tickets

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5. Working on Tickets

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• What is the "Working on Tickets" workflow?
  • The Process in Action
    • Brief Summary
    • Main Views

What is the "Working on Tickets" workflow?

The core responsibility of GitLab Support Engineers is to resolve user problems by solving support tickets on a daily basis. You accomplish this using the "Working on Tickets" workflow. The focus is being responsible for the continuous progress toward resolution of a specific set of tickets. What does this look like?

Ideally it starts with assigning a ticket to yourself at the moment when you make the first public comment on it. From that point forward you should be thinking about how you can keep that ticket moving toward a resolution that's acceptable to the user. Don't worry - you're not responsible for creating the solution, only for making the solution happen. You're the leader, not the sole contributor. If you can resolve the ticket independently, great! If not, ask others (e.g. create a Slack thread) to help by pairing with you or by providing internal comments in the ticket to suggest next steps. Note that Senior and Staff Support Engineers are specifically charged with putting a large percentage of their time into helping the rest of the team, so they're a great resource when you need ticket help. If you're not able to find someone to work with you, please let your manager know so that they can help with next steps.

Benefits of working on tickets assigned to yourself:

1. You won't have to read through a series of updates from multiple support engineers, and the user, to understand the ticket history, current status, or plan of action. In fact, we encourage you to include a brief description of those items - history (what's happened so far), current status, next steps - in most of your updates to the user so that your last update always tells you what you need to know.
2. With one person in charge of each ticket, you can take a consistent approach to resolving the problem, you can explain why and what you're doing, and you won't repeat or contradict an action taken by somebody else on the ticket. This is a much better experience for the user.
3. Knowing that you're in charge of a ticket gives you freedom to set and manage user expectations at each step along the way, so the user will know what's going on and who's working on their behalf. Again, this is a user experience enhancement.

When you're "Working on Tickets", you're driving achievement of our KPI of Support Satisfaction by helping to resolve tickets as quickly and effectively as possible.

The Process in Action

Brief Summary

Here's what to do when you're actively working on tickets in Zendesk. Divide your efforts between:

1. taking next steps on tickets that are already in your My Assigned Tickets view, and
2. assigning yourself new tickets from the main view for your region and current focus (see Main Views table), and identifying and taking first steps on those tickets

Main Views

These views show all the unassigned tickets for their respective region and focus. All tickets in these views should be new, since all tickets should be assigned when the first reply is made.