Hey all, in my company we've been having a lot of trouble with our first-line support team and I wanted to get some ideas how it works in other companies.
To give some context, I work in a Customer Team (L2-L3 Support) for a MSP, previously I belonged to the Internal Operations Team and they had a very negative view on the first-line team, with opinions like:
- we don't need them
- they lack knowledge
- management can't create a good first-line team because they don't want to invest
But I didn't interact a lot with them before, but now, I have to interact with them on a daily basis, and I see some things that have started to make me worried about the team:
- They ignore KB's
- They say that they don't have access to certain servers, or that they don't find the correct credentials and just pass the ticket for us to solve
- They have people that lack knowledge in some basic support, I have had tickets passed on with notes like "I don't know how to use Linux"
From my point of view and the team I belong now, we all think that management didn't really verify the required knowledge for some members of that team, but they really have a few that are trying really hard to improve their skills.
We have started to try to help them, so that our job can also become easier:
- Improve the language in legacy KB's
- Simplify the process in the monitoring platform with more directions
- Automating some processes so that the first-line can execute fixes without having the required knowledge on the backend
- Picking the best members of their team and promoting them to our team
That team also has some problems that I fully recognize:
- Shit pay
- Bad leadership, that team has had 6 different Team Leaders in a short time (I have been here for only 2 years)
- Lacking interview and requirements for the position
Sorry for the long text, would love to have some feedback from your sides, or is this normal in a lot of companies?
It is pretty typical in my experience for tier 1 to take a ticket and escalate.
The first step in improving it with most organizations I'm at is helping get better information from tier 1.
Once you put a form and policy in place you can go from the first example to the second which is very helpful. If the ticket templates can be pre-populated depending on the type of ticket for those tier 1 workers, you can also bake in troubleshooting for some of the common issues. If the issue isn't well understood and requires out of the box troubleshooting, I don't expect them to be able to deal with it.
Original ticket: Ticket#23232 User states they cannot access Z drive. Reboot no avail.
New ticket once we have a policy and form: Ticket#23232 Desktops --> Drive Access --> Existing access issue
File path: User is attempting to access //company/hr/forms Username: user.name Hostname: hr-3423423-lt Can they access other shared drives?: Yes Are they in the proper group? (See KB2332 to confirm) Error message: error.png Confirm file path is being entered or mapped correctly(y/n): Y Rebooted system(y/n): Y Account locked(y/n): N Account expired(y/n): N Confirmed VPN connection(y/n) etc etc
Yeah I think the problem with my company is that they want both things.
That they can be able to solve easy issues following a KB and to just escalate tickets if they take a bit more time or knowledge to solve.
We're trying to solve the easier issues with Rundeck jobs that they can execute, but I think that will bring a new bag of issues: