Yeah, what you're saying from your company is what our Customer Team wants to do with the first-line support team, but they belong to a Manager that reports to a different stakeholder that we do, unfortunately they see the first-line support team differently.
This is also one of my gripes with immich atm. Sometimes I just want to pick a specific photo that I want to upload
Yeah I think the problem with my company is that they want both things.
That they can be able to solve easy issues following a KB and to just escalate tickets if they take a bit more time or knowledge to solve.
We're trying to solve the easier issues with Rundeck jobs that they can execute, but I think that will bring a new bag of issues:
- If the Rundeck job fails, they will have to not only include the issue but also the error in the Rundeck Job
- How can they check (or even have the knowledge) to know if the Rundeck Job worked like it should, to avoid situations where they said the issue is resolved, but then the client returns the ticket saying that nothing changed
- If a Rundeck job needs some parameters, that may add a bigger level of knowledge for them to have, to avoid running the job on the wrong machine for example
I have a little limitation on my leg because of a work accident, so every time I exercise it makes me feel "normal", like a boost of confidence despite the limitation, I even feel happier when I'm tired, like I needed to expel that extra energy out of me.
In our company it seems like there's different mentalities on what they should be.
We want them to act like juniors for the Customer Team, but their Team management want them to be just like those old phone operators that pass on to the right person.
Thanks a lot for that insight, I have asked current and previous members of the Team about the KPI's and unfortunately they are clearly not alligned with ours.
They have stuff like:
- Don't keep Incidents with your, only solve if it's fast (minus 5min), else pass to the expert team
- Can't keep a Change for more than 5 days, even if it's related to waiting for a client response
They do have credentials to access servers, even with root privileges on some servers (not that we think that's safe), but there's a lot of infighting between their management and other Customer Teams, they're management want them to be able to touch everything but at the same time, doesn't invest in training and want's the tickets to be gone fast.
There's also a lack of leadership and training, currently they have a week of onboarding and it's just watching some Udemy videos.
I really wished they could be a bit better than a simple human "chat bot".
I try sometimes to teach them what I can, they're all in house and local.
I would hope the company could see them as a "first step" to the Customer Support.
Maybe I'm just trying to make them something they're not.
Hey all, in my company we've been having a lot of trouble with our first-line support team and I wanted to get some ideas how it works in other companies.
To give some context, I work in a Customer Team (L2-L3 Support) for a MSP, previously I belonged to the Internal Operations Team and they had a very negative view on the first-line team, with opinions like:
- we don't need them
- they lack knowledge
- management can't create a good first-line team because they don't want to invest
But I didn't interact a lot with them before, but now, I have to interact with them on a daily basis, and I see some things that have started to make me worried about the team:
- They ignore KB's
- They say that they don't have access to certain servers, or that they don't find the correct credentials and just pass the ticket for us to solve
- They have people that lack knowledge in some basic support, I have had tickets passed on with notes like "I don't know how to use Linux"
From my point of view and the team I belong now, we all think that management didn't really verify the required knowledge for some members of that team, but they really have a few that are trying really hard to improve their skills.
We have started to try to help them, so that our job can also become easier:
- Improve the language in legacy KB's
- Simplify the process in the monitoring platform with more directions
- Automating some processes so that the first-line can execute fixes without having the required knowledge on the backend
- Picking the best members of their team and promoting them to our team
That team also has some problems that I fully recognize:
- Shit pay
- Bad leadership, that team has had 6 different Team Leaders in a short time (I have been here for only 2 years)
- Lacking interview and requirements for the position
Sorry for the long text, would love to have some feedback from your sides, or is this normal in a lot of companies?
Thanks for that website, really useful!
Didn't know this existed