SupportFlow Support operations setup Support Setup · USD 129
A taxonomy, escalation rules, and the six articles that replace a third of your inbox
The operating layer for a support function that has grown to 1,900 tickets a month with no structure underneath it.
Two people are answering 1,900 tickets a month with no categories, no escalation rules and a help centre last updated in February. This sets all three up. Categorising three months of history first is what showed that six articles would remove about a third of the volume.
Thirty four percent of tickets are six questions asked repeatedly, all answerable by a documented article. Separately, 41 tickets in three months were escalated to engineering with no owner and no date, and 12 of those are still open.
Taxonomy
What the tickets are actually about
Three months of history categorised into eleven types. You currently have no categories at all, which means nobody has ever been able to answer the question this table answers.
| Category | Share | Monthly | Documented? | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Password and login | 13% | 247 | No | Article |
| How do I export data | 7% | 133 | No | Article |
| Billing: change plan | 6% | 114 | No | Article |
| Invite and permissions | 4% | 76 | No | Article |
| Integration setup, one vendor | 3% | 57 | Partly | Article |
| Cancel or pause | 1% | 19 | No | Article |
| Bug reports | 18% | 342 | n/a | Escalation path |
| Feature requests | 11% | 209 | n/a | Route to product |
| Account specific questions | 17% | 323 | n/a | Genuine support work |
| Sales and pre-purchase | 9% | 171 | n/a | Should not be here |
| Everything else | 11% | 209 | n/a |
The top six rows are 34 percent of everything and all six are the same question asked repeatedly. Sales enquiries are another 9 percent arriving in a support inbox, which is a routing problem rather than a support one.
Escalation
Where things disappear
Escalation currently means mentioning it in the engineering channel. There is no record, no owner and no date, and forty one tickets took that route in three months.
| Goes to | Owner named | Customer told | Review | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bug, blocking, paying customer | On-call engineer | Immediately | Within 1 hour | Daily |
| Bug, not blocking | Engineering queue | At triage | Within 1 day | Weekly |
| Billing dispute | Finance | Same day | Same day | Weekly |
| Cancellation request | Support lead | Same day | Same day | Weekly |
| Feature request | Product board | Not needed | Acknowledged, no promise | Monthly |
| Legal, press or regulator | Founders only | Immediately | No reply from support | Immediate |
| Security report | Founders and engineering | Immediately | Acknowledge only | Immediate |
The last two rows did not exist. In three months your support inbox received two messages that could reasonably be read as security reports and both were answered by a support agent with a standard reply. That is the highest risk finding in this document.
Knowledge
The six articles, in order of volume
- Article 1
Resetting your password and login problems
247 tickets a month. Include the three failure modes your agents actually see, not just the happy path, because the happy path is not what generates tickets.
- Article 2
Exporting your data
133 a month. Screenshots of every step. Your agents currently write this out by hand about six times a day.
- Article 3
Changing or upgrading your plan
114 a month. Link it from the billing page, which is where people are standing when they ask.
- Article 4
Inviting people and what each permission does
76 a month. The permissions table is the part people want and the part that does not exist anywhere.
- Article 5
Setting up the integration
57 a month, and your longest tickets. A documented version saves more agent minutes per ticket than any other item here.
- Article 6
Pausing or cancelling
19 a month, and the one companies leave undocumented on purpose. Documenting it reduces frustration, and a customer who cancels cleanly is a customer who might come back.
Rhythm
How this stays true
| When | What | Who | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily | Blocking escalations reviewed | Support lead | 5 min |
| Weekly | Open escalations over target chased | Support lead | 15 min |
| Weekly | Any question answered twice becomes an article | Whoever answered it | 20 min |
| Monthly | Category mix reviewed against last month | Support lead | 30 min |
| Monthly | Top three recurring issues to product | Support lead | 30 min |
| Quarterly | Help centre reviewed for anything now wrong | Support lead | 2 hours |
The third row is the mechanism that prevents this document being needed again in two years. Everything else is maintenance.
- Security and legal escalation rule communicated to both agents
- Twelve stalled escalations given an owner and a date
- Eleven categories live in the help desk
- Six articles drafted
- Each article linked from the relevant product screen
- Sales enquiries routed away from the support inbox