Support Flow
The ability to communicate efficiently with the Cloud Foundation to ensure a smooth operational model for both support- and news-related pieces.🚧 This capability reference page is a draft.
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A support flow process for customers of the Cloud Foundation is a crucial step in ensuring that requests are handled effectively, customer satisfaction is kept high, and suggestions and feedback to the offering moved in an efficient and clear manner.
A tightly coupled interaction mode between the Cloud Foundation and its customers, enables expedited provisioning and resolution of problems, especially in the early days, which can then later be replaced by more structured processes that will remove overhead and micromanagerial duties from the team for higher order work.
Different Degrees of Support Flow Maturity
Simply speaking, there are three different degrees of maturity within this capability.
First Level
Initially, it makes sense to provide a very basic offering of support first, in order to remain close to the customer in case of any issues, and to not introduce further complexity in an already complex system. Often, this takes the form of a basic support email alias and inbox that the Cloud Foundation provides for their users, and then share this address via the Internal Cloud Foundation Starter Pack.
Second Level
Once enough traction has been gained within the business, a simple support inbox will no longer suffice to ensure quality service to the users. At this stage it makes sense to invest into dedicated tooling to deal with support requests in a more efficient manner. It can also make sense to have dedicated manpower to support teams with requests, depending on size and onboarding process flow.
Third Level
On top level of the maturity journey of this capability is the goal to empower customers to solve their issues in self-service via different capabilities (Community Space or Community Champions for example) and thus abstract responsibility away from the Cloud Foundation except for rare cases that are not easily solved.
At this stage, other means to empower customers might also already be in place (i.e. Live Events & Labs & Gamified Community) that will solve issues in the long-term by tackling requests in a manner where solutions can be easily reproduced and shared instead of necessitating further support interaction.
Lastly, as the Support Flow moves from a responsive to a more proactive solution avenue, it can eventually make sense to stop asynchronous support altogether and have it be replaced via live chat support or an AI-powered assistance to query existing solutions or knowledge-bases directly. This also ensures that Support Flows remain scalable and economical in the long run for the Foundation, without encountering unforseen bottlenecks and shortcomings.
Related Tools
Currently no tool implementations documented. Contributions welcome!
