Customer Request Handling

Purpose

VSHN offers numerous products and services that are produced, set up, and managed by different Value Stream Teams. After onboarding customers or setting up new services, customers often have a need for support requests, service changes, or resolving service interruptions we didn’t discover ourselves. Regardless of which team ultimately handles the request, customers expect such requests to be handled professionally within reasonable (or guaranteed) time, often around the clock.

We need to ensure that these requests are answered in a timely manner and that the requirements, customer expectations, possible consequences, and internal responsibilities are clarified before working on a ticket. This prevents misunderstandings about mutual expectations and gives the engineers a clearer framework for implementing/solving the requests.

Process

This a the first iteration of overhauling the customer request handling process in 2024, see VIP-253 for the proposal for planned, next iterations.

  • Value Stream Teams pull incoming tickets that fall into their responsibility from the ticket inbox.

    • Every team has its own way of checking this at least 2-3 times per day (every 4 hours).

    • If a team can’t cover this duty, other teams assign tickets to that team when they see one and inform them in chat.

    • Should a team miss a ticket, we help out by pinging the team if they leave a ticket lying around for a while.

  • Account Management must be involved if a ticket is unclear, before the ticket is pulled to fastlane or backlog, in terms of:

    • very technically complex (would require big changes, with significant effort)

    • commercially complex (potentially high recurring or one-time costs)

    • contractually unclear/complex (are we allowed to do it, who pays for it, etc.)

  • We still need to figure out how Account Managers can pro-actively join the process

  • Phone Tech hotline goes directly to Opsgenie day rotations of the Value Stream Teams: either someone picks up, or the customer leaves a voicemail, and the rotation gets an alert.

  • Critical tasks (Emergency in Jira) create an Opsgenie alert to the day rotations of the Value Stream Teams.

This process is tracked and reviewed as part of VIP-253.