customer context for support agents

users: customer support agents who have conversations with end-users in support tickets, and the admins that configure the software that the agents use

the problem: when an end-user (our customer’s customer) submits a support ticket, agents often need more contextual details about the customer to be able to successfully resolve their issues. how might we surface custom end-user-specific data for agents to understand their company’s relationship to the end-user outside of the current ticket in question?

goals:

allow agents to review multiple custom end-user (Ticket Requester) profiles in the support ticket view
display relevant Interaction History events to highlight our most recent touchpoints with the end-user
allow admins basic configuration settings for the above features, and enhance the admin configuration flow to be more detailed with helpful descriptions and a more intuitive step-by-step order
implement instrumentation metric measurements so that we might further analyze performance
conduct and present competitive research regarding the “Single View of the Customer” including recommendations for a redesign with new feature development for our User Profile Page
answer functionality questions, record feedback and provision access for two experimental early-access apps to further display self-service knowledgebase article events and custom objects in agents’ ticket views

lessons learned:

it may be worth putting in a significant amount of effort to do the right thing for customers long-term (securely allow image/asset uploads) instead of taking an easy shortcut (providing an icon library)
when your team is incredibly short-staffed, it’s important to establish a repeatable process for feature requests and prioritization so that you can reduce context-switching, overpromising and bloated forecasts