Gone are the days that a software programmer is only accessible through the back office via tickets. Now we have such a specialised person right in customer support, who can fix bugs and find solutions in the code, which will greatly improve service for our clients. 

Cut out the middle

In the past queries needed to get through more personnel. First, the customer care person tried to deal with the problem if they couldn’t solve the problem by themselves, they would need to make a ticket that would be assigned to a programmer who could solve the problem. This could take a while during peak production times when all the programmers are on busy. Small changes and settings requiring a low amount of programming knowledge and labelled non-critical would be completed within 2 and 4 weeks, depending on when in the sprint they were reported. Radek, now being in support, allows us to do small customisation and modification much faster than before. 

The new process now means that the enquiries can be identified at customer care as a technical issue. It then is passed on to the software programmer within customer support. This cuts out any waiting times in assigning the right person for the ticket.  

Customer support workflow

The process of sorting enquiries follows like this: Customer support receives a question. They then identify if the query is a new configuration or a new function. If it is a job for a programmer, the support team needs to be able to demonstrate the issue on their computers. That is why they need to understand precisely what the client has reported. They need to describe the issue in a project request ticket. 

New functionality is sent to the product owner. If the issue is not resolved by doing a configuration, then they go to the software programmer to deal with the issue. 

Organisation focus

At Leon, the workflow is managed according to scrum. One of the main principles of scrum is to identify value for customers, be transparent, be customer-centric, and strive for perfection. We also follow development cycles called sprints, which usually take 2 weeks.

To apply these principles, we aim to improve everything continuously for our customers. By streamlining how users interact with our support team members, we can really add more value to their experience with our software. Tickets are labelled as a bug in the system, development task, or service requests. The technical queries are to be answered by Radek. Therefore there is no need to interrupt the workflow of other programmers in different teams. Everything is handled within customer support.

“The path to solutions needs to be shorter, and decisions need to be taken quickly. “

Radek, Tech Support at Leon Software 

Solutions to go

Since code issues can be identified quickly, we now have an advantage of clearing system requests even faster. Solutions are pushed to production even on the same day. This allows the configurations to be done independently of the production cycles. Additionally, this enables us to do changes without the interruption of the production flow or disruption to the programmer teams. 

We can now let the clients set the highest priorities on what needs to be done. This results in a system that is focused on completing requests for clients, based on the priorities set by them. This creates a cleaner system and with less interruption to the workflow of our clients.

Complex configurations

Another area of excellence that improves customer satisfaction is that a dedicated software programmer can now assist in making complex system configurations. Settings that need excellent knowledge of Leon and IT systems can be done quickly. Setup of things like documents and email templates, forms, reports and certain configurations that need to be executed from the code level.

An additional goal is to relieve development teams from consultations that support needs. As a result, the response time to the client should be faster, and the development teams will be less distracted from the development of new features, which will lead to even faster delivery of new features.