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?
@StuffToWrite Our org is on the smaller side and we outsource our front line to another company in the same city. It’s… challenging sometimes but they’re acceptable for what we hired then to do. The org has a resource they can speak to immediately since all the on-prem staff are slammed. Even if they cannot resolve it and have to make a ticket anyway.
Although if I get one more ticket from the T1 techs saying they tried to reset an O365 password (we don’t have) I’m might scream.
In our company it seems like there’s different mentalities on what they should be.
We want them to act like juniors for the Customer Team, but their Team management want them to be just like those old phone operators that pass on to the right person.