On Fri, Jan 5, 2018, at 00:34, Stephen Satchell wrote: > On 01/04/2018 01:02 PM, Dan Hollis wrote: > > when the first tier incompetence stops, the direct contacts will stop too. > > But, but, but...when the first tier support person gets the training to > not be incompetent, he is promoted to the second tier and the vacuum is > filled with another incompetent first-tier person. > > So, by definition, the first tier of support will only be able to answer > questions "from the book". Anything more complex than what's in "the > book" is bumped to the second tier...where the problem is above the > second-tier pay grade and it gets bumped further up the chain.
Yes and no. You need to have a good "script" for the first-level support, and then you need to have people that understand what they are trying to do: take the information from the requester, do minimal (ideally script-defined) checks, run through it the script, then either fix (and confirm that it's fixed) or escalate. For smaller business structures, you may seriously loosen the script and go as far as require that people answering the phone or treating the support queue have an understanding of everything that the company does and how it does it. This does not scale. You cannot expect this for companies with more than (10s of) thousands of customers. You cannot expect to only have technically competent people to handle 100s or 1000s of tickets per day. Then you compare this with contacting directly someone that only receives a few requests a week because he/she is usually doing something else. That's obviously more effective as long as: - the person in question is still in a position to help or at least to escalate/forward properly - the person in question is still willing to help - the person in question is not flooded with requests impacting his/her normal duties, in which case the willingness to help may decrease to zero (or even make sure that a direct contact is counter-productive). Particularly for abuse management, thinks are a little more complex. Arbitration needs to be done between what you (the requestor) think is abuse, what the provider thinks about it, what the customer thinks about it, what the laws says and what does the contract/T&C/AUP says about it (and about how to deal with it). This may take time, involve non-technical persons and may not give the expected outcome even when dealt with by a good-faith service provider.
