Favorite Tools for Tier 2 Empowerment

Coming from an engineering operations perspective, you want to do all you can to help out the customer care teams to have the right tools for proactively solving customer issues without needing to escalate. When you give them visibility into data which used to be reserved for Tier 3, you eliminate a whole class of tickets from being created, since these teams did not have access to this data in the past. This is my list of (current) favorite tools which give Tier 1 and 2.

The more information Tier 2 has from backend systems the fewer escalations you will see into Tier 3.

User Session Logging

---

Perhaps one of the most powerful tools out there is the ability to see customers web browser sessions. These let you see when users are seeing incorrect data or odd behavior with the user interface. You no longer need to screen share, you can look up the sessions for a specific user, and see the problems they have had in the past. Previously this was reserved for Tier 3 going into server logs and looking for exceptions or errors.

LogRocket is one of the tools which does user session monitoring. This tool is my favorite above the others due to the level of technical information it provides. Not only can Tier 2 personnel use this to see user sessions by searching based on their username, this tool gives them visual indicators into where in the sessions the user is seeing errors. LogRocket also has the ability to share a specific time in a session when a user had an issue. This link can then be used by developers who have a different more technical view within the application to get the information they need to see the technical details of the problem and diagnose. In effect with this tool if Tier 2 can see where the error is, this information can be directly provided to developers for triage and correction.

Email

---

Another common complaint comes from users who did not receive emails or the content inside of them was incorrect. In the past with legacy applications, research into if the emails were actually sent meant only Tier 3 had access. The team would go into application logs to look for evidence of the send. If the send was successful then IT would usually need to look at mail server logs to confirm if the email was sent.

SendGrid can manage email delivery for you. It not only tracks emails sent to each address, but also how many times they opened the email and which links within the email they clicked. SendGrid also checks for any spam reports to ensure no one is incorrectly flagging your emails as spam. This might cause these emails to go to the junk mail folders for other customers using the same mail platform.

Knowledge Base

---

Knowledge bases are a necessary evil as they provide needed information about products and services. However they can be cumbersome to write and maintain unless you have dedicated tech writers on staff. The documentation in them can be a bit mundane and dry, no one will usually sit around and read them. There are tools out there which give users data from knowledge bases right when they need it.

JIRA's Service Desk will show users relevant articles to what they are typing as users are entering tickets. This can be a powerful motivator to not have to enter the ticket if the information they need is presented to them before the enter the ticket.

Data Visualisation

---

Knowledge is power, the more information you can give your support teams about the state of the data underlying the application, the less questions they will ask of you. Much of what happens in an application is tracked in a database but end users only see a portion of this data. Giving support teams access to more of this information lets them do some of the debugging for you.

Redash is a free open source data visualization tool which lets you easily show internal users the contents of your database with just a SQL query. What makes Redash stand out from the crowd is its ability to display data from multiple databases on one dashboard. It even lets you join data from multiple databases to display in one table. This lets you easily aggregate information from different datasources into one place and give your support users the information they need to know where a problem could lie.