Support Desk Playbook

1. Intake and triage

• Capture source (email, portal, phone, internal request).
• Classify by type: incident, service request, warranty claim, or information request.
• Set priority and ownership based on urgency and business impact.

1. First response

• Acknowledge the requester.
• Validate scope, gather missing details, and confirm expected timeline.

1. Diagnosis and execution

• Resolve directly when possible.
• Escalate to specialized teams with complete context when needed.
• Link known fixes from the knowledge base before duplicate investigation.

1. Resolution and confirmation

• Share fix steps, root cause summary, and prevention guidance.
• Confirm requester acceptance before closure.

1. Closure hygiene

• Standardize closure notes.
• Tag ticket outcome (resolved, workaround, duplicate, warranty handoff, KB-created).

### SLA design baseline

• Define SLAs by ticket priority (response + resolution targets).
• Differentiate targets for customer-facing vs internal support queues.
• Add escalation thresholds before breach (for example at 50%, 75%, 90% of SLA window).

### Daily SLA operations

• Review at-risk tickets at least twice daily.
• Reassign blocked tickets quickly.
• Use standardized escalation notes including blocker, owner, and ETA.

### SLA governance

• Publish weekly SLA attainment trends by team and queue.
• Track recurring breach causes (handoff delay, missing information, workload imbalance).
• Commit corrective actions with owners and due dates.

### Deflection process

1. Check existing KB content during triage.
2. Send relevant article links in first response when applicable.
3. If article is missing or outdated, create/update an article before ticket closure.
4. Mark ticket as deflected, partially deflected, or non-deflectable.

### Content quality standards

• Use clear titles matching customer language.
• Include prerequisites, step-by-step actions, and screenshots when useful.
• Add “when to contact support” guidance to reduce dead-end self-service.

### Monthly KB review

• Identify top repeated questions and convert them to articles.
• Retire obsolete articles and merge duplicates.
• Validate search terms that fail to produce helpful results.

Use this checklist whenever a ticket becomes a warranty process item:

• Confirm warranty eligibility (product, serial/item, date window, terms).
• Collect mandatory proof (invoice, photos/videos, diagnostics, issue notes).
• Link ticket ID to warranty claim ID for full traceability.
• Assign the correct receipt process based on product group.
• Set expectation with customer: next milestone, SLA window, and owner.
• Track step progress (start/pause/done) and communicate status changes.
• On completion, close both claim and support ticket with final resolution summary.

### Core KPI set

• Ticket volume: opened, closed, backlog, and reopen rate.
• Speed: first response time, average resolution time, and SLA attainment.
• Quality: CSAT (if collected), repeat issue rate, and escalation rate.
• KB impact: deflection rate, top-viewed articles, failed search terms.
• Warranty operations: claim intake volume, average claim cycle time, on-time completion rate.

### Reporting cadence

• Daily: queue health + SLA risk board.
• Weekly: team performance review + operational blockers.
• Monthly: trend analysis, root causes, and playbook improvements.

• Keep one owner accountable for Support-KB-Warranty process consistency.
• Update this playbook quarterly based on KPI trends and incident retrospectives.