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Best practices for managing known issues?

Answered


Posted Jul 05, 2018

I am looking for some ideas & best practices in managing live issues. If you can offer advice on how to avoid any of the issues outlines it I would be forever grateful. 

Foreward

  • We have multiple live service products, new issues are always being introduced and resolved. 
  • We have a problem ticket for all major issues that are being tracked by our quality/development teams, these can sometimes have 1000+ attached incidents.
  • We are constantly maintaining 50+ problem tickets (10-20 per product), we have built an app to help with this, see below.
  • We typically won't create a problem ticket for low volume issues unless it is high impact, simply because the more we have, the more our agents seem to make mistakes when attaching incidents.

The issues

  • We need a way to track issues that are known but don't meet the criteria of requiring a problem ticket.
  • Agents still sometimes attach the wrong incidents to problems, even with the app I made, but it is much better.
  • Sometimes there is only one player case, or there are multiple but months apart so keeping a problem ticket open for such isolated cases doesn't seem right.
  • We need a way to track these issues long-term, as sometimes an agent needs to correct it for the customer because the underlying issue will never be resolved in the product (yes, this happens, and it makes me sad). 
  • We need a way for our agents to easily identify hundreds of known issues.

What I've tried

  • We have attempted to maintain a help center page with the known issues so our agents can find the information, but our agents simply don't refer to the page enough.
  • We have tried to create macros that relate to each of these issues but often they are used in the wrong context.
  • We have tried a combination of the above.

Our process

Currently our process is simple.

  1. If a problem ticket exists for the customer's case, link it to the problem and follow the instructions outlined in the problem ticket. 
  2. If it is a new issue, then escalate to the investigations team. 
  3. if the issue is known then follow the steps, apply the steps in the help center and/or apply the macro to solve the issue.
    What we are finding here, is agents never seem to identify known issues, and instead opt to escalate the case for investigation to get it off their plate. 

Problem App

I have built an app to help agents easily reference product-related problem tickets. This app allows them to link and view each problem ticket from within any other ticket type without having to reference a separate view (most of our agents are on play-only)


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3 comments

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Heather Rommel

Zendesk LuminaryThe Product Manager Whisperer - 2021Community Moderator

Hi Justin,

This is a fantastic post. I have been searching for a good solution to this myself and open to any suggestions someone can come up with! I can tell you've done your due diligence as I have.  We used the Answer Suggestion App after posting about the known issues on Guide so that hopefully the article would be suggested and show up for the agent.  That didn't do it either...

Will continue to watch this....

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Hi Heather,

Glad there is someone out there just like me. Maybe that means there are others like us that have solved this very problem.

I too have used Answer Suggestion/Knowledge Capture Apps to try and surface these "known issue" articles, however, I found it to be too inconsistent and not doing so well at surfacing them when it counts. I imagine your experience is much the same?

 

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Hi all,

We have challenges around this as well (I think every organization managing live service products struggles in this area). We have tried some similar solutions to yours (I love your problem ticket app - we're just using a separate view as our agents aren't on Play Only). We are posting known issues in our Help Center. One area that we've found a little traction is by sending a summary of new known issues in a weekly newsletter. This keeps the Help Center top of mind and pushes updates to the agents, instead of requiring them to go and check the list repeatedly.

-Z

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