CASE: 1st line support

What is first line support? First line support is the frontline of your customer support desk. First line agents are generalists. They have a broad understanding of the product and they know the procedures that apply to most support needs. First line support is for everyday support issues. First line agents will also collect as much information about a customer’s issue as possible. If they are unable to solve the problem, they hand this information to the second line support team.

Second line agents are more specialist in their knowledge. They don’t use their time for queries that anyone can answer. Rather, they focus on solving problems that need in-depth knowledge about your products and services. So, second-line agents are those that handle escalations, difficult customers and technical queries. They’re more likely to handle issues that span more than one interaction with the customer.

CASE

Customer: Enterprise Insurance customer, with approx. 250 developers and 1.800 business users.

Challenge: Old school set-up with solid processes that hadn't been modernised for a while, kept generating unhappy users. Main complaint being time to delivery and that the red-tape blocked them from doing their jobs. This resulted in a growing shadow IT movement. How to improve the service levels together with the current operational team?

Solution: Removed all dedicated email groups and directed all questions and requests into a joint ticketing system (ServiceNow) for tracking and getting a grip of what questions were the most frequent. From that overview we documented light processes, or rather workflows, semi-automating steps to improve the response time.

Added clear instruction based documents for the support team, enabling easy onboarding of new members, removing the dependency on single experts. Together with the client we improved the operational model and provided valuable input to the tactical team to slowly improve over time, without any disruption, only satisfied end users.

Joint effort

Our resources extended the local support with dedicated technical knowledge to manage and improve the support experience. This enabled the local team to grow their knowledge and focus on the tactical goals, since we managed the 1st and part of the 2nd line support.

Retention

Keeping high retention for 1st line support gives stability, and we have very high retention levels, usually around 2-3 years for these roles. Replacing resources is also a smooth process, since documentation and workflows are prioritised from the first day on the job, makes for easy Knowledge Transfer.