Support Driven Highlights: How often are you dealing with bug reports?

Hey, Support Driven Community. 👋🏻

We’re starting to highlight some questions and answers you’ve all shared via Slack on our blog. We want to showcase your unique perspectives beyond just Slack.

If you’re not familiar with our Slack community, it’s full of 8,000+ members who care about customer support. We ask for advice, share our expertise, and have fun virtually connecting.

Let's get into this week's highlights.

Let's say a growing company doesn't have a form for ticket submissions, only support@companyname.com. Has anybody used or know intelligent self options for ingress emails? I know Zendesk has AnsweBot...but let's say results vary 😉 Anything else people have done or vendors that work great for this scenario?

"My experience of Answer Bot is unless you're dealing with HUGE ticket volume, it's not very useful. It learns over time from large data sets so for "growing" companies/smaller volumes, it's not worth it.

I've seen this tackled in 2 ways:One thing very valuable with Zendesk is the ability to easily create triggers that will auto do things depending on variables. This allows you to essentially do some of your own intelligent routing for inbound (product name routing etc etc). The value is how easy it is to do in ZD versus other solutions. I know Khoros have just launched their "email" functionality into their Care product, and they also have some intelligent routing functionality so that would be one worth reviewing
Having a "triage" person or team. This could be a more junior role where, when there are "unassigned" tickets in a queue, that person could review the case, then do something with it. Assign it, route it, whatever. It could be a role which is rotated or hired specifically for with other work to do when there's no tickets in the queue (actioning tickets, KCS, etc)."

- Josh Sugarman, Director of Customer Org at ComplyAdvantage

"There's tools like Front that we trialled handled this use case. We didn't go with it because it wasn't CRM dependant which is the opposite of what you want."

- Peter Muir, Manager of Support at Dejero

We have a team OKR related to offering great self-serve support. Right now, it could really be renamed "Improve the Help Center". Do y'all have other areas/content that you'd consider part of self-serve support?

"I would think a chat bot with question flows leading you to recommended help center articles would count!."

- Kristen Lovely, Customer Experience Manager

"Check out KCM management practices and if it may be worthwhile implementing some sort of contact form that has answers to common questions. Videos are great, but if your project changes a lot, they can be tricky if you have a scrappy team. Use Gifs in your help center for different types of learners! Don’t forget accessibility and screen readers."

- Juliet DeAmicis, Charity Services Specialist at GoFundMe

"I see self-service as what can allow users to avoid/resolve/workaround hurdles by themselves. Help Center is a big part of it as it hosts probably most of your resources but alone it doesn't ensure a successful self-service experience.

What I would possibly explore:

Web widget (the ZD one allows for contextual search keywords)

Contextual assistance in-app

Chatbot (already mentioned)

Rely on context-rich channels to suggest articles (vs simple email address)

Improve your auto-reply message

A current issue/status page can also help people understand what they are experiencing.

For the Help center:

Rely on the ZD search metrics to add keywords to all articles

Create a more in-depth troubleshooting section within FAQs"

- Jimmy De Santis, Director of Customer Experience at BIM Track

As a CSM, how often are you dealing with bug reports / feature requests?

"Depends on how it comes in. If support gets the request directly, they handle it. If it comes up during a client call or client emails me because of our relationship I investigate, offer temporary place-holder solution, and advocate on client's behalf for bug request and follow up.

We're a smaller org bridging the gap between Managed Service and SaaS, so we're a bit unique. CS is a newer role for us, so we're working on training our clients about it - so that adds to the willingness to be hands on and carry the request rather than redirecting clients to a different channel."

- Maianne Preble, Customer Success Manager at DragnFly Wireless

"Hey Mark, when a POC raises feature requests to me, I see myself as a filter. Sometimes clients ask for things that have no reality of happening given bandwidth/the current roadmap. "I'll pass this feedback along to Product/Engineering" can interpreted as the first step in their request happening and I try to be clear about setting expectations. Our Support team handles bug reports, so if I get wind of them from my POC as the situation is unfolding I make sure they know that it should be directed to Support for the quickest fix. I follow up with the POC if there's a summary of action or anything at the account-level I can mention that will help with relationship-building."

- Kaitlin Lee

"We have a dedicated technical support person. Any bug reports that come in get assigned to her and she escalates to our QA team. Our more advanced general support rep has a feature request tracking database that she manages. Our support is currently totally email based, so we tag emails with “feature request” or “constructive criticism”, and then she adds it to our database which is designed to be searchable/filterable by category and accessible to the whole company. So for example, someone on the design team could look at all things filtered under “design” “constructive criticism”. We currently have a small support team, but my intention was to design this for scalability, and it’s working so far!

We then pass along recommendations based on data prioritization - the more requests, the higher it goes. We have regular monthly meetings with members of other teams and stakeholders that can make these requests happen if it makes sense.

TL;DR, both things go through our small but segmented support team. Technical support handles bugs, general support handles requests, data determines priority, I manage escalation."

- Maianne Preble, Customer Success Manager at DragnFly Wireless

"Our CS team were great partners to support in surfacing bugs that their customers caught or that they discovered while in their customers environment. They’d send a ticket to support about it then T2 support would scope and create a defect ticket linked to Jira with a bug score based on priority or severity to engineers. The score would be influenced by scope of impact - how many reported incidents we have attached to the defect and how many customers."

- Michelle E Hancock, Sr. Manager of Support

See you next week with another roundup of Q&A highlights! If you’re not already part of the Support Driven Slack community, join here.

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