Sysadmin

In most companies I’ve worked for, T1 is there to put in tickets from calls, and handle the simplest of tasks (password resets, account lockouts, “have you tried turning it off and on again” tasks). Anything beyond that is generally sent to T2 (usually the desktop team who then force other teams to accept tickets as needed) and T3 for anything that more systemic or needs deeper troubleshooting and system knowledge.

In many places it’s a combination of piss poor pay creating little motivation and high turnover (and thus lack of training) and management prioritizing the wrong metrics (generally looking for short call times and short call queues). If you want to try and improve things I’d suggest learning about the KPIs that team is expected to meet, and then ask management why they chose those metrics. Generally I’ve found prioritizing first call resolution over call times to be a huge improvement to motivation of the team and user satisfaction scores (we all like solving problems and users tend to be way nicer when you fix the issue vice kick the can).

I would say, at least to your point about them not having access to systems, that’s it’s very common for T1 to have pretty limited admin access to systems. Partly to protect against inexperience, but also as a social engineering protection. If they need to ask for access to pass a ticket for elevated rights, it gets another set of eyes on the call to ensure it’s all kosher.

In a lot of companies, the front line support personnel are one step up from a chat bot. They are there to either look up a pre-formed answer for a common problem, or route the caller to a specialist who can help them. The jobs are usually low pay, and outsourced, so the employees don’t really have a stake in the success of the company.

Sometimes these jobs can be an entry level into applying for a position with the company. Employees who realize this often try to go a bit further in their efforts.

@StuffToWrite Our org is on the smaller side and we outsource our front line to another company in the same city. It’s… challenging sometimes but they’re acceptable for what we hired then to do. The org has a resource they can speak to immediately since all the on-prem staff are slammed. Even if they cannot resolve it and have to make a ticket anyway.

Although if I get one more ticket from the T1 techs saying they tried to reset an O365 password (we don’t have) I’m might scream.

We recruit people with no IT background sometimes and we are doing great, consistently beating every other branch since a massive corporation bought us out. We have a great team that helps eachother out, but more importantly we work closely together with all the senior people within the company, most starting out in first line themselves at some point.

If there's something a first liner is interested in they can schedule an appointment with someone who is our main player in that field and have a personal little course in that platform/whatever.

Seems your guys are very "us and them", which helps no one.

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