Expectations

Our team operates from the assumption that every team member is giving their best every day, while also acknowledging that “best” may look different sometimes. We’re all equally dedicated to delivering remarkable customer service to each client we interact with! As we develop our metrics system and hone our time tracking, we will release expanded guidance. For now the following general goals and guidelines are in place…

1. Team members handling Tier 0 & 1 (Small Business), and Tier 2 & 3 (Mid Market) tickets should complete between 10 and 15 tickets each day.
2. Team members handling Tier 4 & 5 (Enterprise) Tickets should complete between 5 and 10 tickets each day.

You are not expected to fully clear your assigned Market Group’s ticket queue, unless that is feasible between the hours of 9-5.

You are expected to be mindful of Tracking Time & Ticket Tagging. These systems are essential to forecasting team staffing needs and creating client-facing documentation to reduce support workload.

Day To Day Guidance

Mind Your Tier

Each LSS has an assigned “Market Group” when the queue has 30+ tickets. When the queue is less than 30 tickets, all LSS focus on first come first serve – tickets who have been in the queue the longest

• Tier 0 & 1 (Small Business)
  • All LSS may work this group.
• Tier 2 & 3 (Mid Market)
  • All LSS may work this group.
• Tier 4 & 5 (Enterprise)
  • Senior LSS will monitor this queue.

You should primarily handle tickets within your group, but there are exceptions to this rule…

1. If a team member is out sick or on vacation, you should work with your on-duty teammates to ensure that their market group is covered, and any tickets left undone are completed.
2. If a ticket comes into the queue that has a specific language requirement, the team member fluent in that language should take that ticket.
3. If a ticket comes into your assigned Market Group that you’re not comfortable with/need assistance with, other team members can step in and help complete the ticket!
4. If one Market Group’s ticket load is high (25+), team members from other market groups can step in to help.
5. If you complete all the tickets in your Market Group, you should move to tickets in the Market Group with the highest volume (only take Enterprise tickets if you’ve been given permission.)

If you find a company that is showing up with the incorrect Tier in ZenDesk, you can alert the Lead Generation department with this form.

How should you start your day?

1. Check the #fhs_lss room in Slack to see if any notices have been posted for you to review.
   1. If you see a ticket you’ll be responsible for, assign it to yourself and Submit it as open.
2. Begin working on your ZenDesk Queue! Start by responding to clients that have sent in updates to in-progress tickets, and Close out any “Thank Yous”.
3. Move on to New/Open tickets, prioritizing the oldest tickets first (see next section on SLAs).
4. From there, keep on rollin’!

Working with SLAs (Service Level Agreements)

SLAs are the standards we have established for the speed at which we address our client’s requests. ZenDesk automatically applies an SLA timer to each ticket as it comes in based on the client’s Tier and these timers relate to the First Reply Time metric.

In a perfect world, we complete tickets in the order in which they’ve come into our queue. In ZenDesk terminology, these are the tickets closest to “breach”, (a breached ticket means that we’ve missed our SLA target, and will have a red background for the timer). With this in mind, you should always work on tickets that are either in breach or are closest to being in breach.

SLAs by Tier

Each client tier has specific time goals:

• Tier 0: 24 Hours
• Tier 1: 24 Hours
• Tier 2: 12 Hours
• Tier 3: 12 Hours
• Tier 4: 3 Hours
• Tier 5: 3 Hours

How does this impact my workflow, and what should I know?

1. As stated above, we’re looking to handle tickets that are either in breach, or are closest to being in breach, first.
2. Currently, we won’t reach 100% of our tickets before they go into breach, and this is acceptable. Think of SLAs as your guidepost as to what ticket to work on first/next. If you have to choose between a ticket about to go into breach, and a priority ticket that has been posted in #fareharborwebsites or brought to your attention by another method, always opt to work on the priority ticket.
3. Tier 3-5 client tickets should be the most carefully watched when it comes to breaches. Even if we can’t resolve an issue immediately, we should reach out to the client and let them know we’re working on their ticket (and provide an ETA for completion if possible).
4. SLAs are paused on Pending Tickets.

The Daily Wind Down

By 4:30, we should be winding down our work for the day. This means that our focus should shift from starting on new tickets, and focus primarily on the following…

1. Finalizing any open tickets and either submitting them as solved if 100% complete, or as Pending if we’re awaiting information/action from another team.

2. Scanning your assigned Market Group for any priority tickets that may have been missed earlier in the day. Tickets with a direct impact on client sales should be prioritized for completion before your shift ends at 5. For examples of what a “Priority” Ticket is, see these guidelines. If you’re going to be unable to finish a priority ticket, follow the procedure here.

3. Compiling a list of tickets held over for the team coming online next and posting them in Slack. Learn more here.

Pending Ticket Fridays

Every Friday, you should work with your teammates to clear all Pending tickets that haven’t been updated in the last week.

Why do we track time?

• So that we see which clients cost us the most time.
• So that see which issues we spend the most time supporting (which then shows us what client facing documentation is needed).
• So that we can estimate how to properly staff our teams.

Time tracking is not used as part of individual employee performance reviews

How does time tracking work within ZenDesk?

As soon as a ticket is opened, ZenDesk begins tracking time spent on the ticket. When a ticket is submitted either as Open, Closed, or Pending, ZenDesk, logs the time spent. This means that…

• Tickets should only be open when you’re working on them
• A ticket will typically have multiple time logs

If you’re spending time on internal communication regarding a ticket (i.e. waiting for the AM to provide details), you should only have the ticket open when it’s being updated with additional details. You have to post either a private or public comment and submit the ticket again to log that time.

If you need to step away from a ticket, you can press the Pause icon to stop the timer, and then press the forward arrow icon to resume tracking time.

If you have multiple tickets open at the same time, ZenDesk will automatically pause the timer in one ticket when you switch to another.

If you opened a ticket by mistake and have yet to do any work, you can click the circular arrow icon to reset the time.

If you close a ticket by mistake without logging your time, you can reopen the ticket, and log your time spent in the window that appears when you submit it.

Planned Vacation & OOO (Out of Office)

If you’re going on vacation, or if you know you’re going to be OOO, and have tickets that you’ll be unable to complete, do the following…

1. Inform your team so that they can be aware that someone needs to be prepared to help take on your assigned market group.
2. Set a Slack status and AutoResponder away message. For more information on best practices for OOO, see here
3. Document any need notes in non time sensitive Pending tickets you have assigned to you, and assign them back to the FH-Sites Group.
4. If you have any high priority tickets or tickets that need to be completed at a certain date/time, create a summary and coordinate with your team members and select someone for them to be assigned to.

Unplanned OOO (Out of Office)

If you’re going to be out sick, or have an emergency come up, alert your team. From there, they’ll work together to address any of your Pending Tickets and ensure things are assigned/handled according to the correct processes.

LSS Calendar

We have a google calendar, named LSS Calendar

This calendar is used globally and for:

1. Adding your OOO and who your buddy is.

* This will help us all stay connected globally and know who to speak to if someone is OOO, and be able to know how to help in the queue

2. Adding any Scheduled Tickets.

* For example, a ticket comes in on April 22, 2020, requesting to revert all their book buttons back to “Book Now” on Sept 30, 2020. So to make sure our queue stays as clean as possible with almost no “pending” tickets, and be able to focus on the priority tickets, we will close the ticket, add the ticket to the LSS Calendar.

How to Add to the LSS Calendar

Adding your OOO:

1. Go to you google calendar
2. Select the day(s) you will be OOO
3. In the title add your name, OOO, and buddy
4. This step is the most important part make sure you are selecting the LSS Calendar.

Here is an example of how it should look:

Note: Please make sure your OOO has been approved by Coryn before adding it to the calendar. You can also add her as a guest, so she can get notified.

Stay On Top of Your Calendar

Ensuring that you’re aware of any meetings is always a good thing, but in particular, we want to ensure that we’re notified of any upcoming Scheduled Tickets! Here’s what to do…

1. Install the GCal Chrome Extension, and ensure it’s in your toolbar.
2. Visit your Google Calendar, scroll down to “Other Calendars”, and click the “+” Icon to subscribe to the fhsites.support@fareharbor.com calendar. Video Tutorial
3. Click on the Google Calendar Extension Icon, and then the Gear Icon that appears in the top right corner.
4. A new page will open, select the calendars you’d like to subscribe to, ensuring that fhsites.support@fareharbor.com is selected.
5. As a final step, ensure that the “Show Notifications” option is enabled
6. Now you have an easy way to see your upcoming meetings (and easily add new meetings ), and stay in the loop on Scheduled Tickets!

Keep Your Inbox Clear: Setting Up Email Filters

As an LSS Team Member, you’ll receive a constant stream of email notifications regarding tickets. To avoid having these clutter your inbox, take the following steps…

1. Login to your FareHarbor email account
2. Find the gear icon in the top right corner, click it and then click “Settings”
3. Click on “Filters and Blocked Addresses”
4. Click on “Create a new filter”
5. A box will appear, in the field “Has the words” paste “has been assigned to group ‘FH Sites'”, and click “Create Filter”
6. A second box will appear asking what to do with messages that match our filter requirements. We want to select “Skip The Inbox” and then click “Create Filter”.
7. Repeat the steps 0-6, but for step 5, use these string “[FareHarbor] “FH Sites” assignment” in the “Subject” field.

Sign Your Work

While your FareHarbor.com email signature should follow the guidelines listed here, you can also set up a signature within ZenDesk so that you don’t have to type one each time you enter a public ticket reply. Here’s how to do that…

1. Login to ZenDesk and navigate to the top right hand corner, hover over your profile photo and click “View Profile”
2. On the right-hand side of the ZenDesk UI, you should see “Signature” click into the space next to it and you can enter your own personalized signature!
3. While ZenDesk doesn’t enjoy multi-column signature layouts like we use in our email, we should link to the event currently listed in the primary email signature guidelines, and we can use markdown for styling! You can copy and paste the below example and format it to your taste
4. To save your signature, simply click elsewhere on the page.
5. Your signature will now be included in any Public ticket reply.

Here’s an example

Cheers,
Devon H.,
Live Sites Team Lead

[**Find a FareHarbor Meetup Near You**](https://fareharbormeetups.com/)

Signature Guidelines

1. Include your first name and last initial
2. Include your position
3. If you speak multiple languages, please list them after your position
4. Your “sign-off” is up to your discretion. “Cheers”, “Mahalo”, “Thanks”: Take your pick.

Every ticket worked by a Live Site Specialist must be manually tagged based on the type of request it is.

Ticket tagging helps us determine areas where we can better train clients, create macros and improve the Wordpress backend.

The current list of ticket types & description to each tag are included in this doc.

Adding Tags to Tickets

1. On the right hand of a ticket, tags can be added in the Tag Locker widget.
   1. If you know what tag you’re looking for, simply type fhs_ into the field, select the tag, and press enter.
   2. Expand the full list by clicking the “Down Arrow” icon next to the title “Available Tags” and clicking the “+” next to the correct tags to add

Guidance

Time Tags

1. Each ticket should receive a single time tag (fhs_small/medium/large) before Solving.
2. If a ticket re-opens after solving, remove the previous time tag and add in the more accurate one to replace it before Solving. Do not leave fhs_small and add fhs_medium, for example.

Ticket Type Tags

1. Each ticket should receive at least one ticket type tag (for example fhs_activityadd).
2. Think of each task within a Ticket as a tag. Have a ticket that contains a request to adjust content across several pages and add a new activity? That would be tagged fhs_content & fhs_activityadd.

Missing Information

1. Any time there is not enough information to complete a request, please use the fhs_missinginfo tag.
2. If the missing information is from the client, use the fhs_bump tag. More on that here.
3. If the missing information is internal, tag the team you need help from! For example:
   1. fhs_amhelp
   2. fhs_seo
   3. fhs_translations

What are ZenDesk Organizations?

Part of providing solid support is being able to organize and track tickets on a per client basis, ZenDesk allows us to do this through Organizations. Three times daily, a syncing operation occurs between our Close account and ZenDesk, and Organizations are created/updated automatically for us. This sync also imports a variety of client data, such as Tier, region, FareHarbor Site Live Date (if applicable), and more.

This allows for each ticket that comes into our queue to be assigned to the correct Organization. Usually, this assignment happens automatically based on a match between the email used for the support request and what is loaded into ZenDesk.

For example, Rental Company X is synced into ZenDesk from Close. Now any support request that comes from an email address ending in rentalcompanyx.com should be automatically assigned to the Rental Company X Organization in ZenDesk.

However, the above scenario isn’t always the case. Tickets may come in without a proper Organization attached for several reasons…

1. The email address used for the Support Request doesn’t match the domain listed in ZenDesk in the Organization’s profile.
2. An Internal Support Request may have been submitted by someone who used their FH.com email address instead of the client’s email address.
3. A marketing company or other third party is making a request on behalf the client.

Assigning a ticket to the correct Organization.

We want to ensure that every ticket is associated with the proper ZenDesk organization. In order to do this, we sometimes will have to add a user to an 0rganization, the below outlines how we do that…

See a full size version of this recording here.

1. Identify that the ticket isn’t assigned to the right Organization.
2. Navigate to the Ticket Submitter’s Profile (ZenDesk calls this the “End User”) by clicking on their name in the ticket breadcrumbs
3. Scroll down until you see “Org.” in the sidebar on the left hand side, and click “+ Add Organization”, a text field will appear where you can add the End User to the correct Organization. End users can be attached to multiple Organizations!.
4. Navigate back to the ticket by clicking on it in the breadcrumbs near the top of the page.
5. In the left hand sidebar, you should now see an “Organization” dropdown box. Click it and select the correct Organization.
6. Submit the ticket as Open to save the changes, you should now see the correct Organization listed in the breadcrumbs.

An Automated Ticket Reminder in Zendesk

Summary:

The “fhs_bump” tag gives us the ability to set up an automated reminder that is sent to the client when you are waiting to receive information/content from them. It is added manually by an agent at their discretion. When the agent adds the tag “fhs_bump” to a ticket, an auto response will be sent after 23 hours. If the client responds to the auto reminder within 48 hours of the agent’s response, the ticket re-opens in the agent’s queue. This auto response will take the place of the satisfaction rating email.

The purpose is to remind clients to respond with the requested info when it is necessary, and will lower the number of follow up tickets that we receive in the queue.

To set up the reminder you just need to:

1. Add the tag “fhs_bump” from Tag Locker
2. Solve the ticket like normal

The auto response message:

Subject: Action Required: Website Request

“Hi there,

We were just wondering if you’ve had a chance to review the latest update from {{ticket.assignee.first_name}}. {{ticket.assignee.first_name}} is waiting for a little more information from you to move forward with the request. If you would like to provide an update or you require more time to work through our latest reply, simply respond to this email to let us know.

If we don’t hear back from you we will close this ticket within the next few days.

Best, The FareHarbor Websites Team”

Important things to note:

• The “fhs_silent_solved” tag will be added automatically if you use the bump, so that the client is not receiving the customer satisfaction survey while we are still waiting to finish the ticket.
• You will not see the automated response in the ticket thread itself because it is sent as a separate email, but if they respond their response will come back in the original ticket.
• You can tell if a ticket has been bumped because the “fhs_bump_sent” tag will be automatically added.