Alex Turkovic is the Director of Digital CS at Flexera, Founder of the Digital Customer Success Podcast, and a member of Vitally’s Success Network. This article was adapted from an edition of Alex’s newsletter.‍

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You might think that assigned-CSMs are the only ones facing the problem of chasing down support tickets, but it happens in digital and pooled CSM programs all the time as well. 

Ticket chasing starts when a customer is feeling frustrated by either an abundance of support tickets that they’ve submitted, or lingering tickets that don't seem to get any traction.

We all know this game. We go to reach out to an account with the best intention of trying to talk "strategy" and "outcomes," but instead we get an earful of how slow support is to respond to the 15 tickets that are in the system — all revolving around roughly the same issue.

Don't get me wrong, I think there is room for triage. There are certainly times when collaborating with Support on some systematic issues is vital and very much part of a CSM’s job. 

This is especially true when the issue needing to be resolved is in the direct path of your customer realizing the value of the product. I don't classify that as ticket chasing.

However, if you’re spending most of your time with customers reviewing ticket statuses, call after call after call? Congratulations! You're chasing tickets instead of focusing time on driving adoption and value realization.

‍So…how do we stop ticket chasing?‍

If you or your CS team are in this cycle of tracking tickets, it's time to put some things in place to break the cycle. It may be difficult to do, but the sooner you do it, the faster you'll get to driving results within your customer base. 

Here are three strategies from my own playbook to help get you out of support firefighting mode:

‍#1: Support Escalation‍

Cross-collaboration is one of the hallmarks of a good CS leader, and one of the most critical collaborations you can have is with your peer in Support.

Any high-performing Support organization should have some sort of escalation process, and better yet a team in place to help triage customers with particularly difficult situations. 

If your Support organization does have these processes/teams, it is vital that you and the CS team understand and partner with the Support team fully so that you can help them to be as productive as possible.

I recommend regular standups with the escalations function in Support so that you can better understand what is happening within that team and how your particular customers are progressing through escalation.

If your Support organization doesn’t have an escalation team or process in place, this is a wonderful opportunity for you to partner with them to build one, and dedicate some resources to handling these scenarios.

Being able to rely on the Support team’s escalation function will aid your CSMs to get out of ticket statuses and into success planning.

‍#2: One-on-One Office Hours‍

We've all been to office hours meetings before. You know the ones...typically an hour long, with attendees waiting patiently until their question/turn comes up and spending the rest of the time multi-tasking because they have better things to do.

Not effective.

A suggestion would be to offer 1:1 office hours in the form of 15-minute, bookable meeting slots over the course of an hour or two.

This does take some allocation of resources, yet the outcome is very effective as it gives your customers a focused 15-minute slot in which to ask questions that might otherwise have been a support ticket — or to get programmatic help on something they are working on.

If you establish this in your “digital” segment, make sure that everyone knows about it so that they can help drive the value of these sessions. (Yes, even your Sales team!) 

‍#3: Intervention Playbooks‍

Especially in the lower-tier customer segments, you want to try and avoid having “assigned” resources as much as possible.

Why? Because once you assign an account, it can be incredibly difficult to divorce your account of that assigned resource. That’s not a great experience for your customer, who will feel like they’re suddenly not worthy of your attention.

That said, there are always scenarios that come up where you need short-term, focused engagement on a specific account in order to solve some difficult scenarios. 

This is where an intervention playbook might come in. Sure, you can give it a fancy name if you wish, but ultimately this playbook is a short-term engagement — a month or two, depending on your business — where a resource can be assigned to an account to help solve systematic issues that Support may not be equipped to solve for.

My suggestion here would be to provide a written Statement of Services that includes what this resource can/will do and what they can't do, as well as the time limit for which the resource can be assigned to the account.

This triage method is a great way to provide your internal teams the support they need to remain strategic in nature, while also giving your lower-tier customer some support that they would otherwise not have.

What are some other ways that you have gotten out of "The Great Ticket Chase" with your Customer Success team? Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know what’s been effective for you.