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Everyone Can Contribute: Making Support Effective Through Contributions

Everyone Can Contribute: Making Support Effective Through Contributions

Presented at Support Driven Expo 2022 on October 20, 2022.

Everyone dreams of talking to someone who can solve their problem. Opening up ways for Support team members to contribute to documentation and code will improve the customer experience and the company’s efficiency and we can prove it!

Full write-up: https://wp.me/pHQ83-279

Cynthia "Arty" Ng

October 20, 2022
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Transcript

  1. About me • Many Customer Service-related roles • Teacher >

    Librarian > Support Engineer • Management experience • At GitLab 4+ years • Staff ~= Manager • Documentarian
  2. GitLab as of 2022-10-01 • 2000+ team members • Fully

    remote in 60+ countries/regions • 130+ Support Engineering (including managers)
  3. Answer the following questions • Do you work in Engineering?

    • Do you have a Support team? • Do you have a backlog? • Do you want to increase your velocity?
  4. Part 1: Give your team access • Talk to Development

    and Product. • As many projects as possible. • Ability to submit contributions to docs or code.
  5. Part 2: A well-defined review workflow • Build trust with

    Development. • Have a process designed for anyone to propose changes, and get it reviewed. • Make it easy for Support to contribute. ◦ Example: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/contributing/merge_request_workflow.html
  6. Part 3: Avoid the small things ending up in your

    backlog Skip this: 1. Support opens issue 2. Product & Development schedule it (at the expense of other work!) 3. It gets fixed 4. Support finds out later Get this: 1. Support submits a fix (and send a link to the customer!) 2. Development reviews 3. Fix gets merged
  7. Build it into Support • Provide & budget time •

    Job responsibility • Performance review • Onboarding ◦ Example: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-training/-/blob/master/.gitlab/issue_templates/Documentation.md • Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
  8. “I've seen minor contributions to the documentation directly deflect tickets,

    make answers frequently asked support questions publicly available/discoverable, and even mitigate or avoid customer emergencies. [...] I estimate each time the upgrade docs are updated by a Support team member, at least a dozen future support emergencies are mitigated.” - Greg Myers
  9. “If a docs or code contribution I write helps a

    customer or another team member troubleshoot a problem in a more efficient manner on their own or it resolves their problem completely, that’s a win for me. It’s a very satisfying feeling knowing that something you did is improving the efficiency and user experience for everyone else.” - Anton Smith
  10. “Having your code or docs update reviewed is an excellent

    learning experience that leads to a much greater, low-level understanding of the product and its components. If this doesn’t make us more effective Support Engineers, I don’t know what does.” - Łukasz Korbasiewicz