MEET THE CUSTOMER SUPPORT TEAM

Debbie Bradley
Service Desk Team Leader

I’ve been with Redcentric for two years now. I started on the service desk and quickly became a team leader. Before joining Redcentric, I had quite a diverse career path. I trained in commercial interior design, and I’m a qualified business strategist. I worked in domestic interior design, production and warehousing. I also worked as a freelance business strategist supporting small businesses to develop their offers, while providing online marketing, copywriting and sales support, focusing on social media platforms, Pinterest and email marketing. This varied background has given me a broad perspective and skill set, which I believe helps me effectively support and manage my team and address the different challenges we face in first-line support.

 

My team is responsible for answering all inbound calls into Redcentric Support, ticket raising, and first-line triage and troubleshooting. We manage a range of tasks from simple password resets and logging into portals to more complex technical triage for network and voice. My role is to oversee the distribution of the workload, ensure tickets are logged and routed correctly, and ensure the team is performing first-fix attempts, when possible, alongside our colleagues in Hyderabad.

The skills and competencies required for these roles are quite varied. First and foremost, excellent people skills are crucial because we often deal with customers who are facing urgent issues. Technical skills can be taught, but the ability to remain calm and composed during high-pressure situations is essential. For instance, some customers were impacted by a global issue outside of our control on a recent Friday, which meant that by ten o’clock we had 65 calls, and by the end of the day, we had managed 103 calls, as well as our existing workload. It was vital for the team to keep a level head and ensure every customer felt heard and supported.

We train the team to be proficient in ticket management processes, understand SLAs, and first line technical knowledge for our network and voice services. They must also be adaptable, as the nature of our work can vary from day to day, so we’re continually looking to improve our processes and address any gaps in skills or service. Internal development and continual improvement are key focuses for us, and it’s rewarding to see team members grow and move into other areas within the organisation.

Managing the variety and volume of support tickets has its challenges, as we can’t predict what will come in on any given day, but we have several strategies in place to ensure everything runs smoothly. First, we have a clear process for ticket raising and categorisation. Tickets are logged and routed based on their priority and type, which helps us address the most critical issues first.

For example, P1 tickets, which indicate a full loss of service, are our top priority and have a response target of 15 minutes and a resolution target of four hours. Lower priority tickets have longer SLA targets to balance the workload.

We also split the team’s responsibilities to make sure everyone knows their focus. Some team members prioritise taking calls, acting as gatekeepers and handling ticket raising, while others focus on first-line triage and initial troubleshooting. This division helps ensure that both calls and tickets are managed efficiently while supporting one another.

To keep track of our progress and identify areas for improvement, we perform monthly quality checks for the team, and hold regular leadership meetings alongside other support teams where we review tickets that failed to meet SLAs and gather learnings to improve our processes. We also identify training needs and make contextual adjustments to our services as we go.

Another critical element is communication. We maintain open lines of communication with our customers and other teams within Redcentric, to make sure information is shared quickly to the relevant parties.

Lastly, we leverage tools like SMAX for ticket management, we also work with our customers on how to log tickets via the self-service portal and access the knowledge base to make the overall process more efficient.

By having clear processes, division of responsibilities, maintaining open communication, and continually seeking improvements, we ensure that our team can effectively manage the variety and volume of support tickets they handle each day.

We help a whole variety of customers every day, but I’ll give one customer group as an example. Recently, a global outage impacted GP surgeries that we support, this meant a surge in calls, 64 inbound in the first 3 hours, to implement urgent changes to their telephony messaging to advise their patients.

While we couldn’t help them with the direct issue, we worked with the surgeries to raise support requests, generate new messages using our text to voice system, and upload them to the telephony platforms to let their patients and callers know of the current situation, and any alternative steps they could take. While this is a small part of what we do on service desk, it has a much wider impact, not only for our customers, but for their end users and customers too. Being able to effectively and efficiently support our customers in their work is the real success.

Click into some of our key team members to find out more about them

Suzanne Hullah

Customer Services Manager

Read more

Paul Sandhu

Customer Success Director

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redcentric

Redcentric

0800 983 2522 sayhello@redcentricplc.com