Realistic ETAs on Customer Facing Issues

"When is it gonna get done?" has to be the most common question asked by support personnel when a customer issue has been accepted for development. When customers communicate problems to your organization they usually expect timely resolution, and your customer facing support teams feel this pressure. This has to be one of the harder questions to correctly answer as it depends on many factors. There are data points Tier 3 can provide to help out this process to enable better data driven decisions.

Providing product managers with reproduction and scope of impact information aids in decision making for more accurate ETAs and prioritization.

Tier 2 / 3 Data Points

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Tier 2 ideally should provide these data points for Tier 3 to triage an issue. Consistently providing this information in the same format allows Tier 3 triage engineers to quickly understand an issue.

• Defect description. This usually comes from the text entered by Tier 2 when raising the issue.

• Reproduction steps. In order to see the issue in action, Tier 3 should be providing steps on how to reproduce this in a production environment.

• Desired behavior. List how you expect the application to behave if there was not a bug.

In order to enable effective decision making Tier 3 needs to augment the data provided by support teams to ensure product gets a complete picture and impact of the problem.

• Backend services affected. List the components / services on the backend where the issue resides.

• Augment the above data points with any technical information needed to better understand the issue.

• Impact analysis. Product needs to know the extent of the issue as it impacts customers. This is usually gathered from a database. How to perform this analysis has been discussed on the providing problem impact analysis page.

Once triage is complete on an issue the above data points should be assembled together and presented for product to make a decision.

Product Management Commitment

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The next step in this process is to get an agreement from product managers the information Tier 3 provides to them will be enough to make a decision. Review the above data points with product management to ensure the data you provide is what they need to make the correct decision.

Another way to set expectations on these decisions is to implement an SLA around this action. This helps product to understand per issue when decisions need to be made and stay on top of getting customers answers. An added benefit is this also allows customer care teams to know when to expect decisions on open problems so they can proactively communicate with customers on the issue.

The decision you are really requesting from product is a simple yes or no, will they commit to fix this or not? A good rule of thumb is: if you cannot commit to fix this within the next 12 months, then say no and close out with the appropriate reasoning. If you can commit to fixing the issue, then giving a general ETA of somewhere between 1 week to even 12 months does give support teams a timeframe which can be communicated to customers.

Product Considerations

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When product is making a decision about prioritizing a customer facing issue, these are likely the factors they are thinking about and weighing. They want to ensure they fix the most impactful issues for the company. These factors may change the ETA of any problem fix:

• Quality. Does the issue make customers have a lowered option of the quality of the product or service you offer?

• Legal requirements. If your product or service has regulatory requirements which are now not being met because of this issue, this usually becomes top priority.

• Cost of fixing or not fixing. Using the data provided by Tier 3 on the impact of an issue, product must weigh the cost of an issue on the operations of a company.

• Cost of fixing relative to other problems. The issue they are looking at is not the only one in their queue. They also need to weigh against the operational support costs of other issues.

• Benefits of ongoing new development. New development may win important new customers or add features which remove much of the manual tasks. Sometimes the benefits of these outweigh fixes in other areas of a product.