Domain Customer Support

Accountable

Avior Team

Delegator

Business Operations (Management)

Lead

Arngard Brülisauer (Customer Support Lead)

Purpose

VSHN offers numerous products and services, produced, set up, and managed by various value stream teams. After customer onboarding or the setup of new services, customers often have needs such as support requests, service changes, or the need to address service disruptions. These needs arise regardless of the specific team involved, and customers expect professional handling of such requests, often around the clock.

We require a mechanism to centrally own and professionally handle customer requests to ensure expectation management and to refine the request until it’s clear enough for the value stream team to work on. Additionally, it’s crucial to maintain professional coordination and communication until the request is closed, including for tasks initiated from our side, such as changes to services and incidents we’ve identified.

Currently 2nd Level Triage and Support is still mainly covered through Responsible Ops by the Value Stream Teams directly. Transforming this into a centralized Customer Support and mid to long-term into a separate Team is an experiment that started 2023-03-01 and was reviewed to continue on 2023-07-21. With our new Customer Support Lead we have someone who is evolving and leading this endeavor.

Stakeholders

  • Customers: Expect professional coordination and communication and that we address their needs in time.

  • Value Stream Teams: Need assistance with less technical customer communications and expect refined tasks, including customer expectations, understanding urgency and importance, and other frameworks.

  • The Delegator: Needs a central place where we can see what is happening at the Customer Support front and what is working well and what needs to improve in the process, to be able to support the company wide improvement.

  • Sales and Account Managers: As they deal with customers at the overall customer relationship level, rather than at the individual ticket level, they need to have an easy overview of what is happening with their customers, and they need to be informed when things are not going well.

Key Responsibilities

All the following relates to individual customer requests, not work that was sold in the scope of consulting or onboarding projects.
Customer Requests Triage and Refinement

  • Communication with customer to understand what they need and how they expect us to work together.

  • Coordinate with Value Stream Team(s) until clear who can do what until when.

  • Ensure the task and constraints are clearly documented.

  • Get approval from customer on scope, timeline and costs.

  • Assign refined tasks to the value stream team.

  • Identify requests for new business (up selling) and either:

    • redirect to Account Manager and represent the customer’s need,

    • or assist customer to self-service to get the new service.

Oversee Coordination and Communication

  • Track all task that were handed over to the team to ensure: proper coordination, professional communication and execution within agreed boundaries (time, scope and budget)

  • Keep customers informed when work is pending else where, for example in one or multiple Value Stream Teams.

  • Take over non-technical communication with customer during incident resolution.

Represent Customers

  • For the relevant outcomes in (Sprint) Reviews of the Value Stream Teams.

  • For work refinement with the PO of Value Stream Teams.

Process

  • Own and evolve our Support core processes (including OnCall and follow-the-sun locations):

    • 24/7 Incident Management

    • 24/7 Triage and Support

Key Deliverables

  • Refined tasks for the Value Stream Teams

  • Professional customer communication on the task level

  • An (automated) overview of all open and done tasks per customer

  • Documented concepts and processes how-to address the Key Responsibilities, including internal awareness and trainings

  • Go-to person and escalation point for issues within the Key Responsibilities

Dependencies

Contribution of the Value Stream Teams (24/7)

  • Every value stream team needs to provide a defined way to:

    • immediately start working on incidents reported by customer,

    • support request refinement, and do the work that this involves, in reasonable time,

    • work on urgent customer requests within reasonable time.

  • (Virtual) team members to cover shifts in Customer Support.

  • Follow-the-sun locations and / or people ready to cover on-call shifts.

Key Challenges

The majority of our business is quite customer specific and deeply technical, refinement of tasks usually needs engineers with the right expertise but also account managers to contribute constraints and expectations in a reasonable time or make that information easily available. It’s not expected that Customer Support can do the refinement on their own (maybe at a later stage with dedicated engineers). Owning refinement therefore means to make sure the ticket gets refined, usually by engineers, while Customer Support would ensure that it happens, including professional communication with the customer.

Monitoring and Evaluation

  • Review with the Delegator representative every 2 months

  • Feedback from Value Stream Teams (usually Peer Review) - Effectiveness of Triage and Refinement

  • Customer Feedback on support effectivity and response times: Ticket level and customer level surveys.

Accountable Team

Starting a new Team for this Domain is an experiment. In the initial phase, the plan is that people from Value Stream Teams provide the needed workforce, similar to the Triage part of to the old Responsible Ops.
Avior

This domain is tracked and reviewed as VIP-253