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?
In a lot of companies, the front line support personnel are one step up from a chat bot. They are there to either look up a pre-formed answer for a common problem, or route the caller to a specialist who can help them. The jobs are usually low pay, and outsourced, so the employees don’t really have a stake in the success of the company.
Sometimes these jobs can be an entry level into applying for a position with the company. Employees who realize this often try to go a bit further in their efforts.
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.
You also have to think about what metrics your company is using for them. A lot of times for front line phone support it’s length of call. They’re not going to dig in they’re going to push it to the first relevant department they can.
This reminds me of the common saying, “if your metrics become targets, then they are no longer metrics.”
Worked at one place where they looked at first call resolution for the front line techs, and they would often just mark a ticket as resolved because they told the caller to restart and call the support line back afterwards, or something similar.