ASE - Where to Document and Manage Work for Accounts

Introduction

Global Support Engineers track all of their work with customers in support tickets. As an ASE, you will likely need and want to use more than one tool for tracking and managing the work you do with your assigned accounts. Some work will fit well in support tickets, other work will not. Your customers will have opinions, maybe strong ones, about how, when, and where they want to communicate and work with you.

On this page we establish a consistent set of practices for ASEs to follow while working with accounts. The goals here are to help ASEs to:

• deliver exceptional service to each account by being receptive to their unique working styles and communication preferences
• keep their work organized and prioritized
• highlight ASE progress and accomplishments
• support Sales in demonstrating the value of the ASE service to prospective and existing accounts
• collaborate with others
• make it easier for others to serve as their backup

Tickets vs. issues

Many ASE accounts have a Customer Collaboration Project, and they might want to work with you through those projects. Which work should be done in the collaboration project, and which should be done in support tickets?

• Reactive Work: Product and license problems and questions are best tracked in support tickets
• Proactive Work:
  • Planning for architecture changes, migrations and upgrades is best managed in issues and epics
  • Discussion of best practices and how to structure workflows is best managed in issues and epics

Proactive work

If one of your accounts wants to work with you through their collaboration project:

1. In the Customer Collaboration Project, which you will find under the https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/account-management group, create a label for that account named ASE Work - ACCOUNT.
2. Subscribe to the label.
3. Notify your customer contacts and your account team to apply that label to any issue or epic in which they want you to contribute.
4. Consider creating an issue board in the project that will show only items with the ASE Work - ACCOUNT label. You could use the board to sort items by priority, stage, or whatever other category makes sense for your work with that account.

Interactive work

Slack

Many ASE accounts share an external Slack channel with GitLab, allowing GitLab team members to communicate with them in Slack. Because communicating in Slack is so quick, virtually the same as a live conversation, customers might want to work with you almost exclusively there. But Slack does not provide the structure, retention, organization, data, or reporting that we need. Conversations in Slack can be hard to find, and often lack the focus of a support ticket.

Your customers might find it especially attractive to work with you in their Slack channel when they are experiencing an emergency. That’s understandable, and could easily be seen as a big part of the value of the ASE service. Just be very diligent in such a situation about capturing quickly in the emergency ticket all of the important information from the conversation.

How should you use your account’s external Slack channel?

• Interactive Work:
  • Questions about creating tickets or issues
  • Adjusting the prioritization of ASE work items
  • Notifications to or from customers that something is urgent and important
  • Sending a Zoom link for an unplanned meeting

Calls

Ticket-related calls

When you host a call with an assigned account in order to work on one or more of their support tickets, plan to create a call summary in each of the tickets just as you would with any account.

All other calls

When you host or otherwise participate in a call with an assigned account for reasons other than working on support tickets, it is still important to document that call:

• Who was present?
• What was the purpose of, or reason for the call?
• What topics were discussed?
• What decisions were made?
• What action items were generated, who is the DRI for each, and what is the schedule for each?

If work prioritization is discussed, be sure to include clear notes about what priorities were changed and what the new prioritized list is.

Where should this be documented?

In order to make the record of your work with each account readily available to the customers and the account team, use the account’s collaboration project:

1. Create an issue for the call:
   1. Name it <YYYY-MM-DD> Call: <Purpose>
   2. Use the issue description to capture the notes
   3. Consider using tasks to capture action items
   4. Apply the label described under proactive work
2. Consider creating an issue template as well, which would allow you to:
   1. Include instructions for how to title the issue
   2. Use the /label quick action to apply the correct label
   3. Provide an agenda and notes template

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