ClearFeed Request Management + External Ticketing

Best Practices for Customers:

1. Ensure all the discussions related to a single request are covered under the same thread which can help the support team track and promptly address the issues.

2. Unless necessary, avoid tagging individual support team members or client servicing teams for the requests. Your requests will be attended to by the right team members based on your support contract.

3. Creating tickets is advised if the issue reported is a bug, critical issue impacting business, downtime, or Feature Request, To create a ticket, please apply the applicable emoji on the first message of the thread.

4. The expected response time for any requests on your slack channel would be x hours/minutes. Our support hours are <>. Please refer to our knowledge base articles <> (Link them to the channel) for quick reference for general queries for faster resolution. [Define the support hours and SLA policies to customers as per the contract]

5. If a ticket is created by your team the response time on your slack channel would be x hours/minutes (add notes on difference by priorities). Our support hours for tickets are <>. [Define the support hours and SLA policies to customers as per the contract]

6. Defining other support mediums/channels apart from Slack and any other escalation mechanism you want to provide to customers.

Best Practices for Agents:

1. Group the customers in collections by the priority of the customers and promised response time SLAs in their contracts. Attach each collection or group of collections with similar policies to a different triage channel for effective management. You may need to staff appropriately in each triage channel based on expected volume and response time expectations.

2. In some cases, it might be helpful to break down customer channels into collections by the phase of customer roll-out. Eg. Pre-Sales, Onboarding, and Ongoing Support , as the nature of queries and type of customer service reps supporting the customers in each phase may be different.

3. Configure workflows at collections in the following manner. If the promised SLA to the customer is 2 hours, set up workflows on no response to trigger in the respective triage channel at 1.5 hours to drive the team’s attention to potential breach chances.

4. Mute all customer channels and respond to customers from the triage channel only in respective request threads. All your responses from the triage channel in the respective request thread would get posted in the thread where the customer has initiated the request in the customer channel.

5. As much as possible, discourage customers from tagging specific individuals from the client servicing team and encourage customers to confine requests to a single thread.

6. Whenever there is a new query on a customer channel it gets posted at the bottom of the respective triage channel. If you are the assigned support executive managing the triage channel for specific business hours, you can pick the request and respond. (Clarify the policy of assignment to your team members. Eg. round robin, technical nature of the query, etc.)

7. ClearFeed clubs related and rapid consecutive messages from the customer in the same request and posts them in the same thread on the triage channel. Any response from the triage in this case would get posted in the first messages on the customer channel in the thread.

8. While responding from the triage channel, to get a preview and more context of previous customer conversations, you can visit the customer channel. However, ensure that you don’t reply from the customer channel, or else it will create dual notifications on Slack from both the customer channels and the triage channel.

9. If the query on the triage channel is meeting coordination (eg. when is a good time to talk) or acknowledgment (eg. Thanks), you can mark that as “Not A Request” on the triage channel. While calculating the metrics on ClearFeed, we don’t consider the metrics on these queries.

10. You can collaborate with support and engineering teams with internal comments on the triage channel. Simply apply :lock: and communicate internally. Any slack comment that is followed by this emoji will not get posted on the customer channel. You can also edit and delete comments on the triage channel and the same would reflect on the customer channel.

11. If you need to go from a customer channel to a specific request from the triage channel, you can click on 3 dots on Slack to find Clearfeed Actions and click on the “View in Triage” option to go to the request on the triage channel.

12. Classify the support requests on the basis of request type and complexity such as L1 (How, What, Why & When), L2 (Complex Issues), L3 (Bugs), L4 (Feature Requests), L5 (Downtime/Other urgent issues).

13. For L1 and in some cases L2 support queries that can be resolved in one session (eg. 60-120 mins), don’t create a ticket against the customer request. Create tickets for issues that are L3 or above only by applying the ticket emoji on the first message of the thread on the customer slack channel, and hand over the conversation to the ticketing system.(This action would be shortly supported from the triage channel).

14. Once a ticket is created against a request, we move the status on CleaFeed to “On-Hold” and don’t sync the messages from the customer channel and your ticketing system to the triage channel. The status will move to “Solved” when the linked ticket to the request is solved. Generally speaking, it’s our assumption that there is a different team that is taking care of issues on the linked ticketing system.

15. When your shift is ending, hand over all open and in-progress requests to the support team members in the next shift. You can do this either from the ClearFeed Webap (web.clearfeed.app) or the ClearFeed Slack App by searching the requests that are assigned to you. Whenever you assign someone an issue, they are notified of the same in real time on the ClearFeed App.

16. Whenever you are starting your support shift, you can review all requests assigned to you which are “Open” or “In-Progress” by going to ClearFeed Webapp (web.clearfeed.app) or Slack App and filtering the requests by collection.

17. You can escalate a request on ClearFeed to engineering systems like Github or JIRA for feature requests or bugs. This would send over the complete conversation context (all slack threads and attachments) to the downstream engineering systems and link the request on ClearFeed with the engineering issue. You will get notified back on the triage thread when the downstream issue is solved.

18. You can review the support metrics (number of requests, response time) of the requests that you / team have managed by going to the analytics module and filtering the metrics by the assignee, channel, and other such cuts.

Best Practices for working with engineering:

Coming soon!