Hey all, in my company we’ve been having a lot of trouble with our first-line support team and I wanted to get some ideas how it works in other companies.

To give some context, I work in a Customer Team (L2-L3 Support) for a MSP, previously I belonged to the Internal Operations Team and they had a very negative view on the first-line team, with opinions like:

  • we don’t need them
  • they lack knowledge
  • management can’t create a good first-line team because they don’t want to invest

But I didn’t interact a lot with them before, but now, I have to interact with them on a daily basis, and I see some things that have started to make me worried about the team:

  • They ignore KB’s
  • They say that they don’t have access to certain servers, or that they don’t find the correct credentials and just pass the ticket for us to solve
  • They have people that lack knowledge in some basic support, I have had tickets passed on with notes like “I don’t know how to use Linux”

From my point of view and the team I belong now, we all think that management didn’t really verify the required knowledge for some members of that team, but they really have a few that are trying really hard to improve their skills.

We have started to try to help them, so that our job can also become easier:

  • Improve the language in legacy KB’s
  • Simplify the process in the monitoring platform with more directions
  • Automating some processes so that the first-line can execute fixes without having the required knowledge on the backend
  • Picking the best members of their team and promoting them to our team

That team also has some problems that I fully recognize:

  • Shit pay
  • Bad leadership, that team has had 6 different Team Leaders in a short time (I have been here for only 2 years)
  • Lacking interview and requirements for the position

Sorry for the long text, would love to have some feedback from your sides, or is this normal in a lot of companies?

  • StuffToWriteOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    Thanks a lot for that insight, I have asked current and previous members of the Team about the KPI’s and unfortunately they are clearly not alligned with ours.

    They have stuff like:

    • Don’t keep Incidents with your, only solve if it’s fast (minus 5min), else pass to the expert team
    • Can’t keep a Change for more than 5 days, even if it’s related to waiting for a client response

    They do have credentials to access servers, even with root privileges on some servers (not that we think that’s safe), but there’s a lot of infighting between their management and other Customer Teams, they’re management want them to be able to touch everything but at the same time, doesn’t invest in training and want’s the tickets to be gone fast.

    There’s also a lack of leadership and training, currently they have a week of onboarding and it’s just watching some Udemy videos.