Improving Efficiecy and Accountability through Specialization

In a multi-product environment keeping up with ever changing features and bugs can be a daunting task, sometimes having well places silos with appropriate coverage and accountability can have benefits to efficiency, quality, accountability and speed.

Back in 2018 I was tasked with finding a way to categorize the types of tickets that we were receiving into support so we could report on how many tickets were generated for different topics.

For each category I was able to create a Zendesk trigger which matched common words and phrases sorting the tickets in "Buckets". For a while after the team flagged tickets that had been marked incorrectly and anything not automatically sorted was sorted manually. Using this method we were able to reach around 90% of tickets accurately sorted into these buckets and this laid the groundwork for many initiatives and changes to the way we work over time. 

The first major switch was moving our account management and billing related queries into a separate team. The tools and processes for these were often vastly different to the rest of our tickets and context switching between these and a product issue was inefficient. For the rest of the topics we had one, LARGE, backlog often upto 150 tickets or more for our small team this was daunting. SLA's were being pushed back out to over 2 business days. We recognized that we needed to try something different and between myself and the leadership team looked again at the results of splitting our billing tickets.

We ran an experiment. We split off one of the bigger ticket topics assigned it to a smaller group of individuals as their only responsibility. The results were immediate the team was able to handle a high number of tickets and began collaborating with the engineers responsible for their tooling on common issues affecting customers driving down their volume by 50% from its peak.

We saw these results and moved quickly in creating 2 other teams to cover the remaining topics advocating for JOMO (Joy of missing out) on topics they were not directly responsible for and establishing lines of communication with their respective engineering and product teams. This 2 way communication allowed us to surface the top issues from customers and provide better data on engineering initiatives. It created tight accountability and backlogs disappeared almost entirely in a matter of days. First reply times dropped from 2+ days down to ~5 hours (often faster) and were even able to push this down to 2 hrs for our paid customers..

Feedback from the team was hesitant at first but they quickly appreciated this new focus and became subject matter experts on their ticket topics. The more technical folks in the team were always there to help out but slowly this was less and less required as our team were able to get more and more in depth on their smaller area. 

At the time we were rolling this out I was a  Support Lead also handling the support operations so as well as being a strong voice advocating for this way of working I was responsible for rolling this out for my team, and implementing all Zendesk and Jira changes as we iterated  through the rollout.