General Tech Support investigation and escalation process

This article is intended to be a general guide and best practices document for investigating Vasto tickets, and - if necessary - how to escalate tickets to Engineering for review. If you follow all of this advice, you'll be doing a great job as a Tech Support team member!

Investigating tickets

A large part of the Tech Support role revolves around reviewing and investigating incoming tickets. Now, when a ticket comes in / is assigned to you, you may know how to solve it instantly. That's great! However, there will often be times that you'll need to investigate a ticket and spend some time figuring out what's going on - for example, is there a bug? Has some system configuration been set up incorrectly? Good old user error?

When investigating a ticket, I recommend searching the following three places;

1. The Vasto Knowledge Base. These are user-facing articles that, for the most part, were written by the previous CS team. They're not particularly in-depth, but they often come in useful as a foundation for forming an initial concept of Vasto's many features.
2. Previous Zendesk tickets. Zendesk contains a wealth of practical knowledge in that we can thoroughly review previous communications with a client. For example, if someone asks you to "Add an Inventory Code", searching that in Zendesk will likely show you what needs to be done, how to respond to the client, etc.
3. Search through Slack. Some internal conversations never make it to Zendesk, and you can often find advice and instructions on assorted processes and issues by searching for key words/phrases inside Slack.

Regardless of whether you find assistance above or not, it's also a very good idea to document your thinking process via Internal Notes as you work through a ticket. Good internal notes will consist of direct links, screenshots, written notes of the processes you've tried, even some short recordings if your setup allows it. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you should always note down the various IDs you're working with (enrolment ID, student ID, timetable ID, course ID, activity ID, etc etc etc) and that pretty much every screenshot, with a few exceptions, should always include the web address bar.

If you get stuck, aren't sure how to proceed, would like someone to look over your logic, etc - time to escalate!

Escalating tickets

Most of the time, when escalating tickets, you'll probably be bringing them to the Tech Support Team Leader, who will then have a look and escalate further if needed.

However, there will be some times (if the Team Leader is on leave, for example) where you'll take a ticket as far as it can go and you'll need to actually escalate directly to engineering. Below are some hard rules about what you need to do before escalating to engineering;

1. Ensure you've searched all of the three places listed above for details related to your ticket. You shouldn't necessarily perform a literally exhaustive search, but do spend 5-10 minutes trying. If you escalate something and it turns out the answer was pretty easy to find, I will frown at you through my computer screen.
2. Ensure you've saved all of your findings as Internal Notes into the ticket. And, by the way, this does imply that you've at least attempted to figure out what the issue in the ticket it - never ever just punt stuff to engineering. I will do much worse than just frown at you.
3. At the very, very least you need to provide a copy/paste of the "Technical Information" box found at the bottom of any relevant Student Progress Tracker;

If you've done all of the above and the ticket is ready to to be escalated, follow this process;

First, click the + button to the right of "Side Conversations" at the top of the Zendesk ticket, and then click Slack;

This will open a small panel that allows you to send a message directly into a Slack channel. Any thread-level responses to that message will then be saved in Zendesk under this ticket.

On the panel itself, in the "To" field, select #va-support.

Then, in the "Send a message field", insert a short message detailing what the issue in the ticket is, keeping in mind the following;

• Your message should always start with the subscriber ID, as well as any other IDs who are reporting the issue (if any).
• If there's any specific urgency, this should be referenced on the next line - otherwise skip this. I tend to use the following urgencies, from least urgent to most urgent;
  • No urgency line present; this is something we've noticed internally, or is a minor question relating to a system feature that doesn't need an immediate response. 
  • "Semi-urgent"; this is something that should probably be looked into, but this isn't blocking anything or there are workarounds.
  • "Urgent"; this is something that is a serious problem, blocking a user from doing something, and really should be investigated as soon as possible.
  • ":fire:", also known as "the fire emoji"; this means something has gone majorly wrong and multiple subs are affected. System outages, outcomes not being saved, large-scale problems of that nature.
    • Any variation of "this one specific client has a specific problem" is never worth a fire emoji. I don't care how big the client is, fire emojis are only for actual wide-scale system issues.
    • If you misuse the fire emoji, and I find out about it, there will be hell to pay. Think kneecaps.
• Include a short description of the ticket, ideally no more than two or three sentences as shown in the example below;

When you click Send, a new message will appear in the #va-support channel. This has effectively entered a queue to be reviewed by engineering, and they will do so as soon as possible (keeping in mind existing responsibilities, their own priorities, etc).

It is important to note you, as the escalator, are still responsible for this message. If engineering hasn't responded within a day or two, it'll need to be you who follows up on it. For this reason, I recommend flagging it for follow-up inside Slack so you remember to keep an eye on it. I also recommend enabling notifications for the thread so that you get notified as soon as engineering responds to the message.

After you have escalated a ticket to engineering, it is very important that you notify the client. I recommend sending a public reply that says something like;

I also recommend that you set the ticket itself to On Hold - this way it won't clog up the master in-pile of New and Open tickets.

When engineering does respond, they'll usually walk you through the issue, or directly provide advice to return to the sub. The important thing is that you, in your role as a Tech Support Team Member, will be the link between engineering and the subscriber - outside of some very rare cases, engineering will not be responding directly to the subs themselves.