Customer Support Triaging

The speed at which to triage

In order to set-up the team for success meeting our internal 1-hour SLA, it is critical that the triage team triages every ticket that comes in within ~10 minutes of it coming in.

That said, there may be times when we have unusually large amount of work or more folks are out than normal and it is fine customers have to wait. In such situations, we follow support capacity levels and contingencies.

How to triage like a pro

• Step 1: In the triage view, the first step is to open a ticket and understand the context of the message. Slow down and have a closer look at the content and the medium from which the message originated (emails tend to be rare). Is this related to another open issue? Is this a new issue? Is this not an issue at all?

• Step 2: If the case came in via Slack (whether or primary account and the support- or trial- channels, or our Community account and the #help channel, or the Hubspot “talk to a dev” form), change the requestor to the person who requested it. This is not necessary if the ticket came in via email.

  • Sometimes it may be an internal person and that would be correct, unless our teammate is posting on behalf of the customer and then we would want to change it to the customer.
  • When an application engineer is assigned to a customer, this step will also trigger that application engineer and their backup to appear as a follower (you don’t see these auto populate until after you save the ticket (ie “submit as open”).
  • For the Hubspot form, we will need to email the person from our work Gmail account with a subject like “Sourcegraph inquiry” and support@sourcegraph.com in cc and let them know a member of the team will help them. We do this so that we can ensure the customer gets the email since Zendesk could block it.

• Step 3: Identify if there is action for CS or not

  If there is an action for CS, got to Step 4. There is an action for CS if the action is to:

  • troubleshoot
  • explain how a feature works in the product/how to do something in the product
  • handle anything related to security for a customer without a CE
  • handle a feature request for a customer without a CE

  If there is no action for CS, go to step 9. There is no action for CS if the action is to:

  • handle anything related to licensing
  • handle anything related to security for a customer with a CE
  • handle a feature request for a customer with a CE
  • provide guidance on how to think about using Sourcegraph/drive adoption (ie more proactive in nature guidance)
  • for employment verifications, we can reply and send the requestor to our Truework landing page where they can get what they need.

  If it’s not clear, post in #customer-support-triage and brainstorm the best path.

  If it’s from the Hubspot form and for marketing, engage them in the #marketing Slack channel and @ mention @marketing-operations.

• Step 4: If it’s from Hubspot, change the subject to “Sourcegraph help request”

• Step 5: Leave an internal note that says “In CS queue for helping” and share any other context for the team. This note also syncs to Salesforce so that CEs know our triaging decision.

• Step 6: On the left panel, under Tags, select, triaged.

• Step 7: On the left panel, under the Select Assignee tab, pick Assign to this group and submit the ticket as open – this will make sure the ticket lands in the Unassigned queue (which requires that ticket have the tag “triaged,” status of “open” and assignee of the Support group).

• Step 8: Create a post in our #customer-support-internal Slack channel altering the team that there is a new ticket available to take.

• Step 9: If there is no action for CS, use the “no action for CS macro” and leave a reason why not – remember, these internal notes sync to Salesforce so CEs know our decision making. This macro should also change the assignee to Virginia, which is important so these tickets don’t count in the support metric data. You may then submit the ticket as solved.

FAQs