Domain Customer Support

Accountable

Customer Support Team

Delegator

Business Operations (Management)

Lead

Arngard Brülisauer (Customer Support Lead)
Currently Triage and Support is mainly covered through Responsible Ops by the Value Stream Teams directly. Transforming this into a separate Domain and mid to long-term into a separate Team is an experiment that starts 2023-03-01. With our new Customer Support Lead we’ll have someone to evolve and lead this endeavor.

Purpose

A customer may require services from different value stream teams (different VSHN products). They might need assistance, additional services or existing services are interrupted and impairing customer business. They want to talk to VSHN and be informed by VSHN on progress of what is relevant to them. Value Stream Teams work on their product and run instances of it for our customers, they can only work effectively on things that are clear and relevant to them. When customer requests end up directly in a Value Stream Team, each team would (inefficiently) clarify things independently with the same customer, may not be able to help at all, may miss important customer communications (for example during incidents), or the request may be incorrectly prioritized and even go unaddressed for too long.

We need way to handle individual customer requests effectively and in time, keep customers informed, and to represent the individual or aggregated customer need towards the rest of the organization, so that teams get relevant work, that they can understand and effectively deliver, and customers expectations can be met.

Stakeholders

  • VSHN Customers directly

  • Value Stream Teams

  • Sales and Customer Care

Key Responsibilities

Customer Requests Triage and Refinement

  • Identify requests for "new business" and either:

    • redirect to Sales and represent known customer need,

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

  • Own customer requests until handed over.

  • Refine (and split, create new) tasks for the Value Stream Teams.

  • Have an (automated) overview of all work per customer (excluding work that is tracked in the scope of managed projects)

    • For customers with a Key Account Manager, support the KAM to have this overview.

Customer Communication

  • 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

Procedural tasks and assistance

  • Do procedural, simple or clear tasks directly.

  • Assist customer to self-service according to product documentation.

Key Deliverables

  • Refined task for the Value Stream Teams

  • Assistance and support on request level for customers

  • Documented processes including internal information and useful training

  • OnCall concept and shift planning

  • Defined (personnel) need for follow-the-sun locations

Dependencies

  • Get missing information from Value Stream Teams, Product Management and Product Owners.

Monitoring and Evaluation

  • Review with the Delegator representative every 2 months

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

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 current Responsible Ops.

This domain is tracked and reviewed as VIP-253