Make Engagement Easy

So you've got a Production Support team, now what? The team has to be accessible to clients. Who are your clients, both internal and external partners. It's important to be thoughtful about the avenues provided to engage a Production Support group. Let me provide some examples of how different teams choose to be engaged and what the pro's and con's are for each method.

Telephone hotlines are a typical way to be contacted. Having a hotline means your customers' questions are answered on the spot and phone interactions provide and opportunity to ask questions about the urgency of the request as well clarification around the problem. Hosting a hotline also means you have to staff it adequately such that users don't wait too long for an answer during the period the hotline is "open." The analysts who field questions in the hotline also have to be quite knowledgeable regarding all the features of the application - at least at a basic level. There's nothing more frustrating for a business user than the feeling of getting the runaround when faced with a critical deadline or outage.

Email provides an easy method for contact. With the widespread use of mobile technology, users have the ability to send email readily. Email, however, is free-form and initially might not contain any information regarding urgency (or clarity around what might be the issue). Email does provide the ability to attach screenshots which might help determine what went wrong. In cases where clarification is needed, it's best not to follow up with an email, but a phone call might be most appropriate.

Ticketing systems provide the ability to engage a Prod Support group while doing a bit of screening regarding the urgency and nature of a problem. They are less free form than email, but might not be as readily available to users (e.g. when the ticketing system sits on an Intranet).

More and more teams offer the ability to be contacted through group chat as well as instant messaging software. These suffer from the weaknesses of email (free form), the weaknesses of ticketing (not widely available outside the organization), and hotlines (someone needs to be ready to respond). They do provide ease of engagement when available and also allow for more interactive vetting of an issue than email.

Typically the best approach is to provide various types of engagement menthods and let the users determine which ones they'd rather use. I generally don't like tickets, as most users find it a bit easier to send an e-mail than to play 20 questions when engaging Prod Support. Emails tend to provide a happy medium between ease of engagement and capturing of data about the Problem. Of course, other methods than the ones provided here might help as well.