How Freshdesk Support Team Uses Freshdesk
As a support agent, there aren’t many things as serious as hearing there’s downtime. If the very word made you sit upright, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
2 years of tickets, SLAs, and hair loss – and just about everything else – have taught me to always have a contingency plan. On my journey from an L1 agent to having been a Technical Account Manager for a handful of enterprise customers, it’s the lesson that has paid off the most.
Having used Freshdesk extensively, I’ve learned to make the best use of it. As a team, we’ve found great success with Freshdesk and realised that there’s no better way to support our customers. To help you optimize your support workflow, I’ll outline the nuances of how we use our own helpdesk software, Freshdesk, to run our support team.
The Freshdesk Support Team
The way our team is structured is integral to how we function. If you have as much as signed up for a trial of Freshdesk, you probably know that the quality of our service doesn’t depend on how much you pay. Our support is available 24×7, spread across three time zones, covering various regions. With a team lead managing each region, every regional team has:
– A helpdesk analyst
– L1 agents
– 2-3 L2 agents
– Technical Account Managers (TAM)
Agents in these roles may not use Freshdesk the same way. Well, there is no one way to use Freshdesk. Understanding our process will make you see things in a new light, and help solve that nagging problem about support processes that your team has been struggling with.
Helpdesk Analyst
When a ticket enters a region’s support queue, Freshdesk’s round robin assignment circulates it among the agents online in the group. For whatever reason, if a ticket doesn’t get assigned and falls off the queue, the analyst makes sure it isn’t overlooked and that all customers are attended to on time.
The helpdesk analyst takes care of marking the right ticket properties, so that pulling out reports to understand the team’s performance is easy and returns accurate data. The weekly agent performance reports from the helpdesk analyst help agents understand their performance in terms of response and resolution times.
L1 Agents
Every L1 agent concentrates on L1 (Level 1 – How-tos) and L2 (Level 2 – requires analysis and troubleshooting) tickets assigned to them and makes sure their first response time (FRT) is 58 minutes or less. Customer satisfaction for the team as a whole is aimed and maintained at 90% or above. There’s also a friendly competition internally across regions for topping the leaderboard in achieving the highest points for CSAT.
L1 agents are scheduled to pick calls and chats every alternate week.
Now, Freddy, Freshdesk’s Omnibot, helps us deflect L1 tickets by suggesting articles from our well-structured helpdesk knowledge base. This has helped our customers gain a wider understanding of the feature they had questions regarding. The few L1 tickets that do come through are assigned to the newer agents in the team. The Agent assist bot helps these new agents get answers to questions quickly thus decreasing the overall resolution time.
Agents make use of canned responses, and scenario automations to resolve tickets faster.
What about the more complicated tickets?
L2 Agents
For questions that need some analysis and probing, we set the type of the ticket as L2 (Level 2). Certain issues that might be beyond the scope of the agents are passed on to the developers for debugging. The ticket is marked either as a bug (based on the issue, and how many accounts are impacted) or a fix is deployed for just that customer, should it be account specific.
In the case of bugs, a tracker ticket is created using the Linked tickets feature. Support agents link all the tickets reporting the same issue with this tracker. This tracker is then shared with our Dev team using Shared Ownership by the support team’s designated L2 agents.
L2 agents act as a conduit between customers and developers by owning the additional responsibility of prioritizing, and following up on these kinds of tickets. They move these tickets to the right developer in the Dev team, track, monitor, and inform the support team once the issue is fixed.
Our Support team is the voice of the customer in Freshdesk. Every month, these L2 agents help the dev team prioritize the road-blocker bugs in the product, share details on how many customers have reported this issue and collaborate on deciding which ones need to be fixed on priority.
Technical Account Manager (TAM)
TAMs are the senior product specialists, with more than a year’s product expertise and experience. They mostly handle L2 tickets and implementation of Freshdesk for customers. They will also be on buffer for the chat/call support schedule, and jump in whenever we’re seeing a surge in incoming chats/calls. Apart from managing a team of 4-5 L1 agents, they are responsible for mentoring new agents and onboarding them to the team. They also help with being the first level of escalation for customers.
Yeah, I know, that’s a lot of information to process. So here’s a table that puts these features alongside their purpose:
Feature Requests
As a company, we have focused on building products around our customers, enabling them to deliver moments of wow. Every feature request from a customer is different and it is important to build features that our customers need. So, how do we decide on which feature requests to accept?
The support team, being the voice of our customers, passes on customer requirements to our product managers. They help our Product team understand why a particular feature is important, and prioritize the requests accordingly. For every new feature a customer asks, the support agent creates a tracker ticket and assigns it to the Product team. The tracker ticket gives the count of this particular request and based on the ‘most-asked’ feature, product managers structure the roadmap for the upcoming quarter.
Latency
With a large and exponentially growing customer base, you can imagine the number of tickets the support team will receive should there be, God forbid, a latency or downtime in the product.
We quickly notify the concerned teams regarding the slowness and it is recorded as an incident on our internal bug tracking tool. To make monitoring easier, a tracker ticket is created for the issue. Meanwhile, our status page is quickly updated by our Operations team and promptly shared with our customers to keep them apprised on the issue.
Once the fix is deployed, a broadcast message is sent from the tracker and all the agents with tickets linked to the said tracker are notified of the fix. They then proceed to inform their customers about the fix.
This is what a regular day in the life of a support agent in Freshdesk is like. Does it seem blue? Well, not really. Because, hey, my customer just said I’m awesome because I helped solve their issue in a jiffy. And that made my day and makes all the effort worth it!
