Decreasing Time to Resolution in Customer Support

[WayneWooldridge]

Author:

Austin Smith

Role:

Customer Support Engineer

Company:

Alteryx, Inc.

Collaborators:

Brandon Frontz

Overview of Use Case

Alteryx used Alteryx to rapidly gather and interpret materials from customers in complex server cases, eliminating the need for customers to manually gather required files and large amounts of information. Often messages about what information we need are lost in translation. This issue was addressed by deploying a self-diagnosing workflow with several dynamic scripts and commands to gather required hardware and software information and perform an initial interpretation on the fly.

The Alteryx solution helped Customer Support to consistently reduce time to resolution for extremely complex and previously lengthy server cases resulting in improved customer experience and more efficiency in Customer Support, spending more time solving problems than pestering the customer for information.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

Customer Support is hinged around great customer service and experiences. Creating an amazing experience is an artform created by a number of different aspects; resolution time of customer issue, knowledge transfer to the customer and hassle that the customer must go through to come to a resolution are just a few. Reducing hassle and resolution times while increasing customer knowledge is one of the many equations that leads to a great customer experience.

The complexity of customer issues has only been on the rise with the great Community and knowledge base articles available to the customer. Resolution times are directly tied to the amount of information a particular associate in Customer Support can manage as they must look through several different documents for very particular information. A painstakingly manual process with high potential for overlooking smaller details.

Detecting which issue is the main problem that a customer is experiencing is never cut and dry. There are factors that change from customer to customer, each having their own independent environment with their own teams managing those environments. The problems range from very small issues that can be overlooked to large overall problems that span the entire customers organization and environment. Finding the problem, depending on complexity, could take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours or days even for the most experienced experts.

The information required from the customers are extensive, taking hours sometimes to gather from all over their environment. All of the information, especially the documents are full of logging information. Interpreting the logs line by line to fully understand and diagnose the issue is like juggling. You have to interpret and understand several different aspects in the environment to paint the bigger picture. Each working independently each painting a different part of the same picture.

Describe your working solution 

To improve reliability and reduce customer effort level, we implemented several dynamically created scripts and commands inside of Alteryx to gather all the information required for the set solution. This application also contains testing options to find potential issues and give a very quick and thorough understanding of the customer’s problem and environment before even attempting to look at detailed logs.

Process, workflow and technical components:

• High level overview of self-diagnosis
• Extraction of hardware and software information from customer via scripts
• Testing environmental variables against known constraints
• MongoDB data inspection and information extraction
• Server log interpretation
• Performs testing and produces results based on information extraction

Describe the benefits you have achieved

During initial testing and few cases this application was deployed to, this solution helped pinpoint problems in user environments without any additional human intervention. Promptly, with the testing results from the Alteryx Workflow, support engineers are able to go in and resolve the issue without any additional information from the customer, creating the most effective use of both support engineer’s time as well as customer’s time. Previously, errors caught by this workflow would take 1-2 hours to diagnose and now they are able to be diagnosed in just a few minutes, creating a better customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction.

Using Alteryx to diagnose Alteryx promotes the power that Alteryx has to solve problems. Not only do we solve problems using Alteryx but we use our own product to solve our own complex internal problems, showing the great flexibility of the product. Using this application, we have created an environment that allows for faster resolution times on complex server issues as well as promoting overall customer satisfaction. This solution empowers other customer support engineers with less technical backgrounds to take more complex server issues and have a confidence in solving these problems.