Selectable Severity and Severity negotiation
We are launching selectable severity which will give customers the ability to choose severity for their support cases ; this will be a part of our new support offering. While we have clearly defined severity definitions but in order to make sure our support engineers are able to tackle any misuse of this feature , has anyone done any severity negotiation trainings to enable your support teams.
Answers
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Hello Sumit,
In a previous life, we had this model and I have to say that the majority of our cases came is at severity-2, and it was hard to negotiate with customers for a downgrade, especially at the time of case creation as the customer is in reaction to the issue, and takes an emotional approach to setting case severity. What I would suggest is to train your support engineers to not challenge the severity up front, but rather to get a clear understanding of the problem and impact, working with the customer on the resolution path. Once this has well communicated and agreed upon, the Support engineer can then go back to the customer and position the severity change with more confidence, having a broader understanding of the issue and how it impacts the customer's business. Using this approach will surely avoid unnecessary customer frustration.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you would like to discuss further.
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Thank you @PatrickMartin this is great stuff, I agree with your approach . Will let a few more members comment/ weigh in and see if they can also share their experience.
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I did that in the past as an override: some users on the customer side (VIPs or Admins) were entitled to raise the severity level of a ticket, even before escalating. However, during monthly reviews, we showed many of these tickets should have been a low priority. Customers feel comfortable if they're entitled to change the level, but we did our part to educate them along the way.
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