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The requirements of digital operations for businesses in any industry can stretch resources and cause stress — for technical teams racing to keep up, for marketing and PR teams striving to stay ahead of potential issues, and for executive teams watching the market and competitors. Digitalization and transformation present new challenges and opportunities every day for organizations of all sizes and industries.
We know that digital operations is a complex mix of distributed systems mastery and in-depth awareness of the broader IT industry ecosystem. Staying on top of and maintaining your organization’s technical platforms can be daunting. It’s easy to miss things when something goes wrong and your team is embroiled in an incident.
One thing you can never, ever go short on is communications with your team and your users during an incident. We highlight the role of the customer liaison in our Incident Response Training. In this guide, we will revisit some of those points — but with a focus on the role of your customer service team in a digital operations environment.
If your team is new to incident response, you can read up on our methods in the other guide, but it isn’t a pre-requisite for the material provided in this guide.
Who Is This Guide For?#
Customer service, sometimes also referred to as customer support, has a critical role to play in the organization’s day-to-day interactions with customers — and this role is even more important when an incident occurs. We prepared this guide to help customer service practitioners and managers establish strong practices with their peers in engineering organizations. Additionally, engineering leaders should not hesitate to partner with their customer service colleagues to ensure the best experience for their customers and end users.
Customer service is a discipline much like any other throughout the digital organization. Customer service teams need access to tooling and automation that can help them accomplish the organization’s goals and provide an ideal customer experience.
What is Covered?#
- Introduction
- What Is Full-Case Ownership? Our definition of full-case ownership and why customer service teams should adopt this set of practices.
Customer Service in Digital Organizations#
How full-case ownership fits into digital transformation initiatives and ways for customer service teams to quickly demonstrate an increase in value.
- Why Customer Experience Matters to Digital Organizations
- Creating White-Glove Experiences
- Improving Customer Service Agent Experience
Aligning Customer Service and Engineering#
How to align customer service teams with engineering teams in support of the customer experience.
The Customer Service Role in Incidents#
How to make your customer service and development teams part of delivering customer satisfaction instead of just reporting on it.
- Customer Service Role in Incident Response
- Aggregation of Customer-Reported Issues
- Prioritization and SLAs
- Customer Liaison and Stakeholder Communication
- Post-Incident Follow Up
Metrics That Matter#
From CSAT, to NPS, to FCR: how to understand and improve on your metrics.
- Metrics, Goals, and Incentivization
- CSAT, NPS and FCR: Common customer service metrics such as Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, and First Contact Resolution.
- MTTA and MTTR: Incident response metrics including Mean Time to Acknowledge and Mean Time to Recover.
Next Steps#
Put Full-Case Ownership into practice for your team using the PagerDuty platform as an example and learn about our Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud Integrations.
Additional Resources#
Links to additional reading from PagerDuty and other industry sources to help you get started with full-case ownership.
License#
This documentation is provided under the Apache License 2.0. In plain English, that means you can use and modify this documentation and use it both commercially and for private use. However, you must include any original copyright notices and the original LICENSE file.
Whether you are a PagerDuty customer or not, we want you to have the ability to use this documentation internally at your own company. You can view the source code for all of this documentation on our GitHub account; feel free to fork the repository and use it as a base for your own internal documentation.