#QueueHealthHabits

A healthy queue is one with the following characteristics:

  1. No ticket is still pending or active/open after the issue is resolved.
  2. No active/open ticket is left for more than 1 business day without a response.
  3. No pending ticket is “left hanging” waiting on a response to an issue.
  4. No ticket is untagged.

Because all of the above scenarios are difficult to maintain at scale, it’s imperative that support technicians block out time to tend to the three aspects of #QHH.

That’s done in the following ways:

Reviewing and Closing Pending Tickets

Since our first response is designed to be thorough, many times it will resolve the problem, and the customer simply does not reply back. At least twice per week, we’ll reply to those tickets with the Close saved reply (for Zendesk, use the confirm resolution macro), which encourages a response from the customer, and then if they do not reply by the next day, we close the ticket (mark as solved in ZenDesk)

Closing or marking as solved triggers a Customer Satisfaction survey, so we ensure that (as much as is in our control) we don’t close things that have the potential to be urgent for the user. This is left to the discretion of individual agents, and best practice is a note that says why we are leaving the tickets as pending, not closed.

Replying to every Active/Open ticket

Every user who is waiting on us should hear from us every business day. In the vast majority of cases, that touchpoint will substantially move the user toward resolving their support issue. That is to say, we give good replies to everyone that we can during our shift/time allotted to ticket replies.

In some cases, we can’t get a full and thorough reply to every ticket waiting on us each day. In those cases, the customer or user should here something from us, even if that something is

Hey {name},

I didn’t get to deeply troubleshoot your issue today, and I’ll circle back when I get into work tomorrow. In the meantime, here are a few things you could do to move the issue forward: 1.
2. 3.

I’ll still work on this tomorrow, just didn’t want you to think I’d left you hanging!

Those three steps should be top-of-the-head guesses as to what might resolve their issue without our help. They can be phrased as “here’s what I am going to do tomorrow when I get in, in case you want to get a head start”