Get Started with Customer Service Incident Management

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

List the benefits of Customer Service Incident Management.
Define an incident.
Describe incident severity levels.
List the stages of an incident.

Incidents Happen

Ursa Major Solar, Inc., is Southwest-based supplier of solar components and systems. Business is booming for Ursa Major Solar, but recently it faced a significant service incident that it wasn’t fully prepared for. One day, Albuquerque, New Mexico, experienced an extensive power outage. Unfortunately, Ursa Major Solar had many customers in the area of the outage. Since its customers’ solar systems are hooked up to the grid and can’t feed power onto the grid during outages, their power went out too. The outage resulted in many calls coming in to its support agents.

First, the team had to recognize that an incident was happening. In this case, many customers were having the same problem. Then, they had to find experts who could figure out the root cause of the problem and how to fix it. Finally, they had to figure out how to communicate that to customers and the entire team.

Unfortunately, Ursa Major struggled with each of these steps. Each individual agent was trying to solve the issue without realizing that there was a larger problem. Not only did this waste agents’ time, it also created frustrated customers. Second, after the team realized that many customers had the same problem, it took more time to figure out the cause.

Even worse, many of the agents on shift were new and didn’t know who to contact on the development team for help. The volume of calls was overwhelming, so they didn't have time to step back and think. After the problem was diagnosed, it took time to formulate a response. It was definitely a bad day for Ursa Major and its customers.

Even though the team managed to sort out all the cases in the end, they know it could have gone better.

Plan for the Next Incident

Ursa Major’s CEO, Sita Nagappan-Alvarez, worries about what would happen during a more complex or widespread outage. She realizes that she must find a solution before another incident happens.

She makes a list of goals for the next incident.

Recognize the incident quickly.
Have a centralized place to manage the incident.
Route problems to the right experts who work to find the root cause and identify solutions.
Acknowledge the problem and update customers with status and solutions as quickly as possible.
Track the resolution and make sure it’s properly implemented.
Be sure to notify all customers and close all cases.
Streamline and speed up solutions for customers and agents.
Turn a bad situation into a chance to earn customer trust.

Sita hands her list off to star tech support agent, Ada Balewa, and tells her to figure out how to get Ursa Major ready for the next incident.

Customer Service Incident Management to the Rescue

When Ada looks for a tool that meets all Sita’s goals, she discovers Salesforce’s Customer Service Incident Management. Already part of Service Cloud, it helps teams track large-scale disruptions and delegate tasks to the right experts. It also helps teams communicate with customers and roll out solutions. Even better, it’s free for Ursa Major as it currently uses Service Cloud.

She’s intrigued and does more research. She likes how Customer Service Incident Management breaks problems into three stages.

First, there’s the incident, where related cases start coming in and the team realizes how many customers are affected.
Then there’s the problem stage where an expert team gathers to figure out the root cause of the problem.
Finally, the team produces a change request record where they detail the steps necessary to solve the problem.

Ada wants an example, too, so she watches a video to see how a company receives, responds to, and fixes an incident.

Ada wants to try out Customer Service Incident Management at Ursa Major. First, she must do some planning to define and prioritize incidents and make sure the correct people are involved. When she finishes planning, she’ll create a knowledge article with her findings. After it’s reviewed, the team can use it to see what to do when an incident occurs. She’s already set up swarming on Slack, and she knows it will come in handy too.

Define an Incident

Ada defines a customer service incident using the best practices defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) and her own business goals. After she consults with others at Ursa Major, she defines a major incident. It’s multiple related cases that require input from several teams and are either high urgency or high impact, or both.

At Ursa Major, an issue is considered an urgent incident if it meets any of the following criteria.

It can cause damage that can increase rapidly.
If not fixed quickly, it can turn into a bigger incident.
It affects key customers, or has the potential to do so.

For example, let’s say that a particular type of solar hot water heater starts leaking at various customer sites and damaging roof components. Ursa Major considers it an urgent incident because it can cause more damage if not fixed quickly and because it’s affecting several customers.

An incident is considered high impact if it meets any of these criteria.

Someone is injured.
It affects many customers.
It has a large financial impact.
It can damage Ursa Major’s reputation.

For example, let’s say that the solar hot water heater for a large hospital leaks. Patients or personnel could be injured because there’s water on the floor. Ursa Major considers this incident high impact because of the threat of injury and the potential damage to its reputation.

Define Severity Levels

Based on this framework, Ada uses ITIL best practice standards to define a list of 3 severity levels for incidents at Ursa Major: Severity 1 (high), Severity 2 (medium), and Severity 3 (low).

			Urgency
		High	Medium	Low
Impact	High	1	2	3
	Medium	2	3	4
	Low	3	4	5

Ada lists some examples for each incident severity level.

Severity 1: The problem affects all customers, such as a system-wide outage. Customers face financial losses, such as catastrophic hot water heater failures ruining multiple roofs.
Severity 2: The problem affects several customers and their ability to use the product is affected, such as a neighborhood-wide outage.
Severity 3: The problem affects several customers, but it’s not too severe and there are workarounds, such as solar panels losing efficiency too quickly at multiple customer sites.
Severity 4 and Severity 5: Very low priority and can often be fixed using standard case resolution strategies.

Bring in Service Level Agreements

With the severity levels in place, Ada examines Ursa Major’s existing service level agreements (SLAs) with the company’s service level manager. SLAs list the types of service activities that customers have purchased, including any requirements around response and resolution times. It’s important that Ursa Major meet those requirements.

Together, they come up with response and resolution times for different types of incidents based on the incident’s severity and the customer’s SLAs.

Severity Level	Target Response Time	Target Resolution Time
1 (High)	Within 30 minutes	4 hours
2 (Medium)	Within 1 hour	8 hours
3 (Low)	Within 2 hours	1 week

Now they’re sure that they can take good care of their customers during an incident.

Determine Whom to Contact During an Incident

Before an incident occurs, Ada makes a list of people to inform.

Incident owner: Initially, Ada is incident manager for all incidents. When the team becomes more familiar with the process, she’ll expand the list of incident owners.
Technical experts: One or more experts in the type of solar equipment or installation currently having problems form the troubleshooting team. Ursa Major uses senior solar installers or repair technicians.
Service level manager: The service level manager for the affected customers monitors compliance with their SLAs.
Customer service manager on duty: The customer service manager communicates with the team.

Ada has completed her preliminary planning. She writes up a knowledge article with her findings. The team can use it during an incident so everyone knows what to do.

Now Ada knows that Customer Service Incident Management is the best tool for Ursa Major. She’s defined what constitutes an incident at Ursa Major, set up severity levels for incidents, and compiled a list of people to contact. She documented that information in a knowledge article. Now she’s ready to ask her Salesforce admin to set up Customer Service Incident Management.