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Blog » How we use queues to improve our service support
The support team here at Beetil has benefited hugely from the introduction of dashboard queues. Before putting them in place we spent a good amount of time discussing the best way to structure our support and how to use queues to the greatest effect. Once our queues were implemented there was a dramatic improvement to our response and resolution times. Here are the queues that we use:
Customer Unresponded > 8 hrs
Incidents that have been raised by a customer where it has been more than 8 hours and the support team is yet to respond. A healthy count for this queue is zero, and if anyone in the team sees the count ticking over to one or more they are quick to get this back to zero again. Introducing this queue has been the most effective thing we’ve done to reduce our response times.
Unassigned and New
While an incident may have been responded to it is not necessarily assigned to a team member or investigated enough to be set to a particular status. A healthy count for this queue is less than 5, ideally zero. If it starts creeping up it’s all hands on deck to get this down to a more manageable number.
In Progress
This queue is for incidents that are currently being investigated. As with the above queue if the count starts creeping up it’s all hands on deck to get this down to a more manageable number.
With Customer
When we’re waiting for more information from the customer we will set an incident’s status to ‘With Customer’ and it will appear in this queue. Seeing the count here is a good visual reminder of where things are at and stops incidents falling by the wayside.
To be Fixed
We take a sensible approach to providing workarounds or logging change requests in favour of automatically fixing every incident that comes in, but occasionally incidents will require an immediate fix. Incidents with a status of ‘To Be Fixed’ will appear in this queue and if the count starts creeping up it’s all hands on deck to get this down to a more manageable number.
Pending Release
These are incidents that have been fixed in the codebase and are awaiting release. Upon release we’ll get back to each customer, set the status to resolved, and close.
Remember you can create your own personal queues – something I personally take advantage of. In addition to the above queues I also have some personalised ones on my dashboard e.g. “Mine with customer” and “Mine to be fixed”. You can read more about setting up your own queues in our blog post ‘Dashboard Queues’.
As part of our continual service improvement we aim to frequently evaluate our support structure and processes and refine our dashboard queues accordingly. Spend the time on good service design, get everyone involved and you will be rewarded with a happy, efficient team and happy customers!
Tags: customisation, queues, reports