name: support-operations
description: Expert support operations guidance for customer service excellence. Use when designing ticket management systems, creating SLA policies, building support tier structures (L1/L2/L3), optimizing knowledge bases, defining severity levels and escalation procedures, implementing support metrics (CSAT, FRT, TTR, FCR), configuring support tool stacks, or building support-to-CS feedback loops. Covers Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, and help desk best practices.

Support Operations

Strategic support operations expertise for customer-facing teams — from ticket management and SLA design to escalation workflows and self-service optimization.

Philosophy

Great support isn't about closing tickets fast. It's about solving customer problems permanently while building scalable systems.

The best support operations teams:
1. Prevent before they support — Self-service and proactive help reduce ticket volume
2. Measure what drives loyalty — Resolution quality beats response speed
3. Escalate with context — Every handoff preserves customer history
4. Feed insights upstream — Support data drives product and success improvements

How This Skill Works

When invoked, apply the guidelines in rules/ organized by:

• ticket-* — Ticket management, prioritization, queue optimization
• sla-* — SLA design, compliance monitoring, escalation triggers
• tier-* — Support tier structure, skill-based routing, specialization
• knowledge-* — Knowledge base strategy, self-service, deflection
• metrics-* — CSAT, FRT, TTR, FCR, quality scoring
• escalation-* — Severity definitions, escalation paths, incident management
• tooling-* — Support stack optimization, integrations, automation
• feedback-* — Support-to-CS handoffs, product feedback loops, voice of customer

Core Frameworks

The Support Operations Hierarchy

The Support Tier Model

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                         TIER 3 (L3)                              │
│  Engineering escalation, code-level issues, custom development  │
│  Target: <5% of tickets | SLA: Best effort                      │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                         TIER 2 (L2)                              │
│  Technical specialists, complex troubleshooting, integrations   │
│  Target: 15-25% of tickets | SLA: 4-8 hours                     │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                         TIER 1 (L1)                              │
│  First response, common issues, documentation guidance          │
│  Target: 60-80% resolution | SLA: 15-60 minutes                 │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                      SELF-SERVICE (L0)                           │
│  Knowledge base, chatbots, community forums, in-app help        │
│  Target: 30-50% deflection | SLA: Instant                       │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Ticket Priority Matrix

Support Metrics Framework

The Ticket Lifecycle

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                                                                  │
│  NEW → TRIAGED → ASSIGNED → IN PROGRESS → PENDING → RESOLVED   │
│                                    │          │                  │
│                                    ▼          ▼                  │
│                              ESCALATED    WAITING                │
│                                    │     (Customer)              │
│                                    ▼                             │
│                              ENGINEERING                         │
│                                                                  │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Channel Strategy Matrix

Severity Levels

Key Formulas

Cost Per Ticket

Cost Per Ticket = (Total Support Cost) / (Total Tickets Handled)
Target: $5-25 depending on complexity

Support Capacity Planning

Required Agents = (Ticket Volume × Handle Time) / (Available Hours × Utilization Rate)

Example:
(500 tickets × 20 min) / (8 hours × 60 min × 0.75) = 28 agents

Self-Service ROI

Savings = (Deflected Tickets × Cost Per Ticket) - Self-Service Investment

Anti-Patterns

• Speed over quality — Fast wrong answers create repeat contacts
• Ticket tennis — Multiple handoffs without resolution
• Knowledge hoarding — Solutions in heads, not documentation
• Metric gaming — Closing tickets prematurely to hit targets
• Escalation avoidance — L1 struggling when L2 is needed
• Channel forcing — Making customers switch channels unnecessarily
• Copy-paste responses — Generic answers that don't address the issue
• Invisible backlog — Tickets aging without visibility
• No feedback loop — Support insights never reach product
• Over-automation — Bots handling issues that need humans