biztalk360 support team activities

BizTalk360 Support Process

Published on : Feb 20, 2017

Category : Kovai.co

Praveena

Author

The BizTalk360 Support Process

As the product support team, we are customer facing people. The support forms the backbone of every product developed. In BizTalk360 we follow the mantra of “Exceptional Customer Support” and this is made possible through our support process. In our flagship product, BizTalk360, the all-in-one solution for Operating, Monitoring and Analyzing Microsoft BizTalk environments, customer support plays a major role. The BizTalk360 support started with the tradition ways like emails and calls. Soon our CTO, Saravana Kumar, realized that we should have a proper channel for communication and recording the issues. This was possible with Freshdesk. There starts the support process: a complete rule management system. The customers raise issues and we track these through the assist portal with Freshdesk. What if that issue is really a bug? We have to provide the fix. Here comes the Jira software for internal tracking purpose and to coordinate with the internal technical team. Sometimes, we do need to check for issues at customer end. Then we use GoToMeeting for a screen sharing session with the customer. This is the complete pack of the BizTalk360 support process.

The story of BizTalk360 support with Freshdesk

The motto being “Customer happiness, refreshingly easy“, BizTalk360 support also aims for the same. The dashboard is the most significant feature, it gives a clear picture of all the open, overdue and unresolved tickets. We can see our conversations with the customer by clicking on each ticket. This channel seems to have improved the support process. As a Product support team, we make sure there are no long pending tickets. We have included the customer survey which will rate our support to the customer. The portal takes care of rule management so that the tickets get assigned to the right people. Whenever a customer raises an issue, support team members get a notification email. The ticket gets assigned to the person who will take the responsibility of resolving the issue. The number of conversations with the customer also matters.  We cannot go on dragging the issue for a long time until and unless, the customer is busy and delayed in response. There is an “Add private note” section where the internal team members get notified about the discussion on the issue raised, if any technical assistance is required. We have the escalation process in our support to make sure the customer’s issue is taken care of and resolved in time. There are different levels of support team namely L1, L2, L3 and L4 in the ascending order. When a customer raises a ticket, it gets assigned to the L1 Team. This team does the analysis and provides the solution to the customer. In case, if we need any help in resolving the ticket, we escalate it to the next L2 level technical team, adding our observations and details in the private notes section. If it cannot be resolved by L2, then its moved to the L3 team and so on. The L1 team will make the follow ups on the escalated tickets and make sure that they are responded in time and closed after getting resolved. Interested to have a look at the BizTalk360 Support Portal?

Leader-board Achievements

biztalk360 support team members The activities of the support team can be monitored through the dashboard of the BizTalk360 Freshdesk. It says who has done what. The rating in the Leaderboard is based on the number of conversations that we handle to resolve the issue and close the ticket. This helps to improve the agent productivity. The different trophies based on the different criteria include:
  • Most Valuable Player: Agent with the most overall points for the current month.
  • Customer “Wow” Champion: Agent with the maximum Customer Satisfaction points for the current month.
  • Sharpshooter: Agent with the highest First Call Resolution (Ticket was solved with only one interaction between agent and customer) points for the current month.
  • Speed Racer: Agent with the maximum points for Fast Resolution (Ticket was solved in under an hour) for the current month.
The Leaderboard is reset on the first of every month so everyone can start over with a clean slate. Recently we started with the addition of survey rating for our support. When the survey rating was started, my teammate Sivaramakrishnan was leading in all the four categories. Our team is really proud of him. Being with the team for two whole years, he has gained a very good knowledge on the functionality of the product. Behind every brilliant performance there were countless hours of practice and preparation.                                                                                                                         – Eric Butterworth biztalk360 support team This motivation is required for each and every team member to gain high customer satisfaction with clear and appropriate resolution to the issues raised. Of course, we do have some lags when the issue raised by the customer is a rare scenario, which we might not have seen before. Then unfortunately there are a large number of interactions which may make the customer frustrated. The customer’s experience or feelings will help to improve business, especially in the areas of Sales and Marketing. Positive experiences get passed along and even the bad experience would turn into a lesson of improvement for our BizTalk360 Support team. For quick resolution we also set up web meetings through GoToMeeting website where we can have a screen sharing session with customers. The SLA’s for the tickets would be based on the priority of the tickets raised. For example, for a low priority ticket, the due date would be three days. We see to it that we resolve the tickets on time for better customer satisfaction. biztalk360 support tickets The status of the tickets is categorized as Open, Pending, Bug, New Feature Request etc., based on the issues raised and the conversations handled. When we wait for a reply from the customer, we set the status as “Waiting on Customer”. The status of the ticket is changed to closed, once the issue is resolved. This is called “refreshingly easy”, where every act refreshes the status of the issue raised. For the New Feature request, we recommend the customer to add it to our user voice in the feedback portal, where we collect new requirements or enhanced requirements of existing features and take it for development, based on the number of votes received.

The Jira software

The customer raises an issue and if it’s found to be a bug, we have an internal tracking system called Jira. This issue tracking software is used by development and technical support team to get more work done and getting it done faster. When we confirm that an issue is a bug, we create a Jira ticket, assign it to the development team and tag the ticket as “bug” in the Assist portal. They will fix the issue and add it to the upcoming release. We can define the workflow for the same. This is used as an internal tracking system for us. Jira is updated whenever the issue is fixed. We will inform the customer about the fix and close the ticket once after the customer confirmation. biztalk360 support tickets

The GoToMeeting

What if we are not able to reproduce the issue raised by the customer or we need to know their environment setup? Instead of dragging on too many conversations, it would be better if we contact the customer directly. But how? Here comes the GoToMeeting, which is an online meeting, desktop sharing, and video conferencing software that enables the user to meet customers via internet in real time. This way, the customer will be able to show their issue where either we can directly resolve them or get the appropriate details regarding the issue. Before arranging for the meeting, we will confirm the convenient time of the customer and then send the invite. This helps the customer to prepare their environment and even helps us to collect the necessary details. Some customers feel happy when we ask for the call because they feel that it is the faster way to resolve the issue. But some may feel that it’s a waste of time, if we don’t provide a solution or if we ask for some other information. biztalk360 support calls We get a chance to interact with different types of customers in the call. Some of them would patiently listen to us, explain their problem and provide the required details. But some of them would become impatient when we ask them some details. But we assure that the issue gets resolved at the earliest so that the customer’s confidence is not shaken.

Conclusion

With the different tracking systems along with the Support Assist portal, we are providing an exceptional customer support. This can be known from the customer survey ratings, where we have got the rating as “Awesome” making the agents as the “Customer Wow Champion”. We continue our teamwork in achieving “Maximum Customer Satisfaction”. Also, check out the continuation of this blog “BizTalk360 Support Process – Part 2“.