Hey all, in my company we’ve been having a lot of trouble with our first-line support team and I wanted to get some ideas how it works in other companies.
To give some context, I work in a Customer Team (L2-L3 Support) for a MSP, previously I belonged to the Internal Operations Team and they had a very negative view on the first-line team, with opinions like:
- we don’t need them
- they lack knowledge
- management can’t create a good first-line team because they don’t want to invest
But I didn’t interact a lot with them before, but now, I have to interact with them on a daily basis, and I see some things that have started to make me worried about the team:
- They ignore KB’s
- They say that they don’t have access to certain servers, or that they don’t find the correct credentials and just pass the ticket for us to solve
- They have people that lack knowledge in some basic support, I have had tickets passed on with notes like “I don’t know how to use Linux”
From my point of view and the team I belong now, we all think that management didn’t really verify the required knowledge for some members of that team, but they really have a few that are trying really hard to improve their skills.
We have started to try to help them, so that our job can also become easier:
- Improve the language in legacy KB’s
- Simplify the process in the monitoring platform with more directions
- Automating some processes so that the first-line can execute fixes without having the required knowledge on the backend
- Picking the best members of their team and promoting them to our team
That team also has some problems that I fully recognize:
- Shit pay
- Bad leadership, that team has had 6 different Team Leaders in a short time (I have been here for only 2 years)
- Lacking interview and requirements for the position
Sorry for the long text, would love to have some feedback from your sides, or is this normal in a lot of companies?
We recruit people with no IT background sometimes and we are doing great, consistently beating every other branch since a massive corporation bought us out. We have a great team that helps eachother out, but more importantly we work closely together with all the senior people within the company, most starting out in first line themselves at some point.
If there’s something a first liner is interested in they can schedule an appointment with someone who is our main player in that field and have a personal little course in that platform/whatever.
Seems your guys are very “us and them”, which helps no one.
Yeah, what you’re saying from your company is what our Customer Team wants to do with the first-line support team, but they belong to a Manager that reports to a different stakeholder that we do, unfortunately they see the first-line support team differently.