Customer Support Playbook

• The Support Playbook provides guidelines, best practices, and processes for a consistent, high-quality customer support experience
• It serves as a reference manual for support teams, covering customer interactions, ticket handling, technical workflows, and compliance policies
• The Playbook provides information for Support Agents & Team Leads, Administrators & Super Users, and Cross-Functional Teams

Scope of Support

• The Support team provides high-quality assistance to end users
• The team ensures efficient issue resolution
• The team maintains a structured approach to service management
• Key areas of responsibility include user, knowledge, incident and problem, change, and service request management
• User support involves assisting end users with questions, troubleshooting, and product usage guidance
• Knowledge management involves creating and maintaining accessible, up-to-date self-service resources
• Incident and problem management involves identifying, troubleshooting, and efficiently resolving incidents and recurring problems
• Change management involves reporting and tracking end user requests related to product enhancements or modifications
• Service request management involves handling service-related requests per the service catalog and ensuring clear processes with billing

Global Customer Support Values

• Values unite the team, shaping interactions with customers and each other; global customer support aims to be a trusted partner
• They aim to deliver solutions that have a real impact, collaborating within support and across the company for seamless service
• The guide takes ownership with grit, aims for innovation, acts with openness and respect, and fosters an environment for people to succeed
• These values strengthen partnerships, drive long-term success, and set a high standard

Handling Customer Interactions

• When handling tickets and professional interactions with customers, follow the guidelines to streamline collaboration and expedite resolution
• Always focus on resolving the customer issue, communicating clearly and courteously, and ensuring the customer understands what is happening
• Handling a ticket influences a customer's overall interaction with Aceve

Understanding the Customer

• Successfully resolving a ticket requires understanding what needs to be done

• Everyone receiving a ticket is responsible for driving it toward resolution

• Contact the customer or assigning colleague if clarity is needed

• Strive to speak with the customer instead of relying on emails, as it helps to clarify, gather details and ensure alignment

• Email is a complement for written confirmations and the sharing of documentation

• There is no strict limit on the number of emails that can be sent

• You should pick up the phone if written communication does not solve the issue

• Fully understand the customer’s issue before passing the ticket along to avoid uncertainty and delays

• When resolving, summarize the problem with a link to a relevant knowledge base article for future reference

• Ask specific, open-ended questions, follow up until there is a clear understanding, and practice active listening

Ownership and Refinement

• Taking ownership of a ticket means ensuring it is clear and actionable for anyone working on it
• Summarize key information from long email threads to facilitate quick understanding without removing valuable details
• Customers shouldn't have to guess ticket status or chase updates
• Provide updates, even without immediate resolution, to reassure the customer their request is remembered
• Automated Zendesk responses are not a substitute for meaningful updates
• Clearly communicate the resolution so the customer understand the work undertaken to solve the problem
• Customer feedback helps in future interactions and can lead to team adjustments

Refining Tickets

• Ensure tickets always include critical details
• Summarize lengthy conversations to clarify issues and needed actions
• Document actions within the ticket
• Visualize the issue with screenshots or images
• Clear tickets and proactive updates boost efficiency and improve the customer experience
• Every ticket presents an opportunity to enhance the process

Roles and Functional Roles

• Customer support includes core job titles defining permanent positions and functional roles representing additional responsibilities
• Functional roles are assigned based on expertise and operational needs, with potential rotation
• The guide provides an overview of responsibilities with a full description coming soon

Core Roles

• Head of Customer Support provides strategic leadership, aligning the support organization with company goals
• The Head is responsible for: defining the strategy, focusing on improvement, managing collaboration and overseeing workforce development
• The Manager leads daily operations, ensuring smooth workflows and high-quality interactions
• Managers manage team performance, lead support and coach development, ensure customer and team satisfaction, enforce procedures, conduct reviews, and improve efficiency
• Customer Support Consultants handle frontline interactions, providing support, troubleshooting, solutions, and guidance
• Consultant tasks include: triaging tickets, troubleshooting, owning assigned tickets, monitoring integrations and identifying upsell opportunities
• Consultants also contribute to knowledge, escalate complaints, prioritize handling, and engage in relevant Slack channels

System Specialist Tasks

• System Specialists handle complex technical issues like integrations
• Tasks for specialists include: investigating issues, replicating bugs, providing insights, maintaining documentation, and participating in training

Functional Roles

• Functional roles support specialized areas; they are assigned based on expertise and operational needs, and may be taken on voluntarily

Incident Manager

• The Incident Manager handles major incidents, aiming for swift resolution and clear communication

• Tasks include: identifying/coordinating resolution, providing updates via Slack, ensuring postmortem reviews, and driving process improvements

Community Moderator

• The Community Moderator manages engagement in customer forums and self-service platforms

• Tasks include: monitoring discussions, enforcing guidelines, and creating FAQs

Knowledge Manager

• The Knowledge Manager ensures support materials are accurate and current
• Tasks for the Knowledge Manager include: maintaining the knowledge base, documenting new features, and training agents on best practices

Dispatcher

• The Dispatcher ensures correct ticket categorization, assignment and monitoring to maintain efficiency
• Dispatcher tasks include: reviewing ticket triage, assigning tickets, monitoring priorities and reporting deviations

Zendesk Account Owner Role

• The Account Owner is a type of administrator role; there is only one that can reassign
• The Account Owner has exclusive access to subscription changes, billing and payment management, and account changes

Zendesk Administrator

• Administrators are super users who manage and customize Zendesk to ensure smooth operation
• Administrator responsibilities include system and user configuration, scheduling and maintenance
• Administrators also work on reporting and optimization

Zendesk Team Leader

• A Team Leader is like an Agent, with additional permissions, normally Customer Support management, Manager Customer Support or Manager Professional Services
• Team Leader responsibilities are: recovering tickets, deleting tickets, managing teams, creating macros, and managing Guides, reports and dashboards

Zendesk Agent Content Creator

• Agent Content Creators manage articles, themes and settings in the Guide
• They also have that same access as agents

Zendesk Agents

• Agents are support consultants, system specialists, or professional services consultants who handle tickets and interact with end users
• Agent permissions are: accessing tickets, redacting content, merging tickets, editing tags, and managing profiles
• Agents can also contribute to conversation and view dashboards

Zendesk Light Agents

• Light Agents have limited permissions of only providing ticket subject expertise by commenting

• All light agent ticket comments are private and do not occupy any agent seat

• Light Agents can view all tickets, make private comments, act as requesters, access knowledge base articles and privately take part in conversations

• Light Agents can not be assigned tickets, change the status or reassign them, edit the ticket properties nor use the mention feature or respond to satisfaction surveys

Zendesk Tool Structure

• Implemented for clarity and scalability across brands and functions
• The foundation is the HVD Group, with each group representing a combination of product, team, and tier
• Organizations use both product and market tags for seamless routing
• Guide categories are product-defined, with sections based on function, and user segments based on product

Zendesk Automations and Triggers

• Zendesk automations and triggers streamline ticket management and improve response
• Triggers set priority, alert users of updates, reopen tickets, detect Al intent and unassign out-of-office tickets, manage issue types, etc
• Automations send CSAT surveys, remind users about tickets and close inactive periods

Ticket Forms and Categories

• To streamline ticket handling and categorization, use specific ticket kinds
• Tickets should be classified, whether seeking support, reporting incidents or escalating issues
• Questions are for clarifying service needs and don't indicate malfunction.
• Incidents report unexpected issues affecting functionality
• Problems are tracked from recurring incidents to identify areas of improvement
• Service requests are for stand non-incident-related requests
• Content requests relate to new or updated documentation

Schedules and Service Levels

• Support schedules are individualized per Market or Team/Function, and service-level agreements (SLAs) depend on the requirements
• Customer support is opting for a restricted customer portal to offer a tailored, secure experience using Single Sign On (SSO)
• Customers will experience Al support to handle common questions
• Product-Team/Function-Tier naming conventions are for clear ticket assignment; this may have dedicated views, macros and notifications

Zendesk Gather Community

• A platform to share knowledge, enhance customer experience and encourage engagement

• Goals for the community are user empowerment, building of self-sufficient support, encouragement of knowledge-sharing and creation of brand ambassadors

• To engage the community, internal moderators respond in a timely fashion to curate responses

• Provide SLAs for community question responses

• Frequent contributors are leveraged and there is an Ambassador program with potential perks and recognition

• Proactively create content and encourage users to share creative solutions

Success Metrics for Community

• Track questions answered, response time, growth of the Ambassador Program, support deflection and use insights

• Improve by doing quarterly reviews, feedback trends and patterns in what is working

• Support channels reduce burden on end users when used correctly

Handling Suspended Tickets

• Suspended tickets go through Zendesk security such as spam filters

• Ensure channels check their suspended tickets to avoid missing legit requests

• Sites must review their suspended tickets daily

• The system can set recurring tasks

• In the Suspended Tickets view, check the sender’s email and the support requests

• If valid, mark as “Not Spam” to add to the normal queue and if it is not needed, it should be deleted

• To avoid spam tickets, whitelist known domains and advise customers to use secure email setups

Categorization Tree

• Tickets assigned with a two-level setup, product and function
• It benefits ticket handling, reporting and process optimization

Why is the categorization tree important?

• It enables teams to improve reporting, data analysis, escalation, routing, self-service, and the knowledge base

ITIL Overview

• Support relies on ITIL practices to standardize operations, and can be quickly and reliably improved with satisfaction

• ITIL enables the regular measurement of high quality support based on best practices and experiences for continuous improvement

• ITIL handles incidents, issues, changes and supports service requests

Examples of ticket types

• Incidents are unplanned events like when the service is not working or people cannot log in and require emergency response
• Problem Management seeks out recurring incidents
• Service Request Management includes needs such as more training
• To add change management, you can add a feature
• To help, there is knowledge management to update articles
• Questions are requests for information or instructions and are created when a user seeks guidance that requires incident resolution, problem investigation, or formal solutions

Incident Management

• The ticket flow involves support, SME, and development
• There are simple instructions to show how incidents are approached and resolved
• Some key tasks in this section are documenting requests, prioritizing categories, setting priorities, replicating issues, and checking incidents

Using Status Tool and Response

• Status tools like Statuspage notify users on current incidents, disruptions and solutions

• These external tools offer transparency with quick expectations

• Service Status Tools should be used for major disruptions/outages with ongoing updates, workarounds and postmortems; the Incident Manager updates the status

• Incident updates should be available from the IM, Support Team and Product Team and the steps include the posting of initial, regular and final updates with resolution

• The updates should use clear and simple communications

Prioritization, SLAs and RCA

• When problems result in a solution, a report set is created for due dates set in Jira
• RCA is completed by the engineer who solved the code and consists of drop down fields and report
• RCA reports are available in Jira

Change Management

• Prioritization is agreed upon by leadership so customer service considers onboarding needs

Service Management

• Service requests in all support channels are reviewed for how requests are sent, validated, fulfilled and closed

The Service Management Process

• Log requests and ensure they are aligned with service catalogs
• Prioritize in definitions
• Teams can assign them as support tickets
• Provide necessary authorizations and follow SOPs
• Ensure quality and end user confirmation
• When completely solved tickets statuses can be updated

Knowledge Management

• Knowledge is either new or updated in a series of steps

• Steps include triaging, creating or refining the content, reviewing, approval and publishing done by a content manager

Performance & Compliance

• Phone AWT is 150 seconds

• Email is 12 hours

• Chat is 45 seconds

• First Contact Resolution is 70%

• Customer Satisfaction scores are 90% rated by customers 20% rating

• The average question is 7 hours

• P1 is 16 hours

• P2 is 80 hours

• P3 is 720 hours

• Ticket distribution is available on the 1st/2nd line or 3rd line, with 30% on third and 10% on SME