Improving the customer support process between support and product engineering teams

Customer and technical support act as the first layer of defense when customers raise concerns about the company’s products and services. Moreover, digitalization has made the support process more seamless and automated for customers and the support team. However, no matter how beneficial this is, digitalization has its downsides. The volume of support tickets created by customers has significantly grown. Most companies face increasing pressure to streamline their support process to cope with the rising volume of tickets, increase customer satisfaction, and accelerate support management processes. This action research aims to address the same issue encountered by our organization’s Support and Product Engineering teams. Using the Fishbone diagram, my collaborators and I identified a wide array of possible root causes of the problem. With the Prioritization Matrix, we identified that streamlining our support process through ticket categorization and creating a support playbook was more impactful in reducing the number of support tickets assigned to the Product Engineering team. Guided by the ADKAR Model, we trained our Support Team on the new support process and provided them with a playbook that includes all the detailed steps to investigate and address the support issues. After implementing our proposed intervention, we found out that delegating tickets to teams based on ticket categories, whether Operational or Non-Operational tasks, has significantly lessened the number of support tickets addressed by the Product Engineering team