The challenge
The company sells its software by subscription. Customers raised support tickets in Zendesk, and when a ticket needed engineering, the work moved to Jira, which most customer success managers and account managers could not access. Customers who wanted to know where a fix stood called their customer success manager or account manager, who emailed or messaged engineering, waited for a reply and passed the answer back later. Status reports were brought together and reconciled by hand each week. Support held the customer issues and the relationship; engineering held the answers.
The approach
- Matched each support ticket to its engineering issue. Verity joined Zendesk tickets to the Jira issues raised from them. Each ticket then carried engineering's latest priority and status, and the planned release where a fix was scheduled.
- Drew a line around the shareable fields. Customers saw the priority, the status and the release timing. The engineer's name, the internal notes and the rest of Jira stayed inside the company.
- Gave each key customer a secure view of its own tickets. Customers logged in to a portal that showed only their tickets, each with its redacted engineering detail.
- Brought the same view to the company's own teams. Customer success managers and account managers saw engineering's status beside every ticket, with no Jira access needed.
- Gave leadership a complete view for customer reviews. Executive sponsors saw each customer's support performance beside the latest engineering status.
From engineering to the customer
The results
- Hours back each week: more than two hours of manual reporting eliminated every week.
- Daily updates: customers and account teams saw the latest status every day, replacing weekly reports.
- Self-service for key customers: customers saw engineering's priority, status and release timing on their own tickets, without calling their account manager or customer success manager.
- One view across teams: customer success, account managers and executive sponsors worked from the same ticket and engineering status.