Best Practices for Routing Issues to Development Teams
Many issues that users encounter can’t be resolved fully by support teams and must be routed to more technical solution development teams or 3rd party suppliers for resolution. These situations can cause some complications in the issue tracking process that require special consideration. Issue tracking best practices suggest the following aspects of external routing be addressed to avoid confusion in issue ticket handling:
Support SLAs
When you transfer issues outside of your support organizations to development teams or 3rd parties, you risk losing control over the resolution timeline commitments made to the end-users. It is important to have clearly defined SLAs with suppliers and development teams about how quickly issues will be addressed to reset expectations with users.
Integration with 3rd party systems
It is often necessary for development teams to reference data from the issue tracking system as part of their diagnosis and fix development activities. Best practices suggest that the engineering systems or project management tools used by development teams be integrated to your issue tracking system – enabling users to see the status of development work underway and enabling technical resources to see the issue ticket history.
Re-prioritization
When issues are transferred to another team, they go into a new queue and are re-prioritized based on the receiving team’s prioritization rules. This is important because a high priority issue for support teams may be a low priority issue for a development team to address. Best practices suggest that support team managers should maintain strong relationships with development team project managers as a means of influencing prioritization decisions and advocating on behalf of their organization and end-users.
Closing tickets vs. putting them in pending status
This is a policy/process decision for your company. Many support organizations choose to keep issue records open in a pending status while 3rd party development activities are underway. This approach works well if there are automated integrations to update the issue and trigger workflow steps when activities take place on the development request. If you do not have an automated way to sync data between issue tracking and development systems, best practices suggest that the issue should be closed, and the end-user should be directed to the 3rd party or development team for further updates and tracking the progress of their issue resolution.
Communicating with users
When transitioning issues to development teams, it is important to communicate with end-users and help them understand why their issue can’t be resolved immediately and where they should go for further updates on status. Best practices suggest that the support agent should remain engaged and communicating with the user until someone from the development team has initiated contact to provide a continuous interaction during the handoff.