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Follow this guide if you will be out for 2+ days OR if you will be out for less days, but have time-sensitive tickets.
Holidays & Wellness Days
- Company-wide Holidays & Wellness Days (TSEs will observe any company-wide holidays and wellness days):
- Away message should be placed on Intercom.
- Set the message here: https://gemsoftware.zendesk.com/chat/agent#widget/forms
- Holiday Template: Gem is closed on Monday July 5th in observance of Independence Day. We will return on Tuesday July 6th to assist you. Please leave us a message and we will reply to you by email.
- Wellness Day Template: Gem will be closed on Friday, April 12th, in observance of a company-wide wellness day. We will continue to monitor for critical systems issues during this period and will return on Monday, April 15th. If you require assistance, please fill out and submit the form below. Our team will respond to you by email.
- Return Template: Let us know if you have any questions! We will reply to you by email.
- Team Event Template: The Gem Support team will be temporarily offline on Monday July 31st through the hours of 9AM to 11AM Pacific Time. Please leave us a message and we will reply to you by email.
- All major holidays have been added to Zendesk to account for hours of operation, but you can double-check to make sure it’s listed here (if not, add one): https://gemsoftware.zendesk.com/admin/objects-rules/rules/schedules
- The person who updates Zendesk is also responsible for changing the away message and office hours back upon our team’s return. If you will still be OOO, assign responsibility to someone else.
- Default: Let us know if you have any questions! We will reply to you by email.
FTO Guidelines
- When in doubt or if you feel that a customer may be needy for a low priority issue/question, let them know you’ll be out for X days and that they can email support@gem.com if they need more immediate assistance from the rest of us.
- Review your open ticket queue and determine which tickets are high priority or urgent. Some general guidelines for tickets that I would consider falling into this bucket:
- Customer is waiting on you for a reply and you are unable to get back to them before you leave.
- Customer is waiting on Engineering for an update.
- You are waiting on a reply from the customer for a piece of information that unblocks us from digging into a critical issue.
- Something in your ticket has been scheduled that will take place while you’re OOO.
- Find owners for the tickets who you will be assigning your tickets to. Be sure to give ample time for the new owner to review the ticket, your notes, and ask questions before you head out.
- Leave as many internal notes as you can. If an action is needed, make it clear. Others need to be able to understand what’s going on in order to cover for you effectively.
- The method you use to assign out tickets can depend on how many urgent/priority tickets you’ve got and is up to you, but for some inspiration:
- You can make a spreadsheet and share it with the team, like this one: Click Here
- You can ping the #tse channel with a list of tickets and ask for volunteers.
- You can ping team members directly if you feel they might have more context on an issue or account than others.
- If your list is small enough, finding a dedicated PTO buddy who can own all of your tickets might be a good option. Syncing up over a video call to discuss each one while leaving notes might be a good idea.
- New owners can assume they will be owning the ticket until completion. Here are some potential scenarios and what to do about them:
- Keep tabs on the ticket and any associated Asana tasks by adding yourself to them. If there are updates to share with the customer or the ticket requires some kind of investigation, take care of it for the person who is OOO and communicate with the customer.
- If we are waiting on a reply from the customer and they do not get back to you while the OOO person is out, reassign the ticket back to them when they return. This prevents handing off between multiple TSEs, which makes for a smoother customer experience.
Verbiage examples:
HIGH PRIORITY
Hi CUSTOMER,
Just a heads up that I’ll be out of office beginning tomorrow and will come back X. I’ve enlisted the help of my colleague Y to continue our conversation and have filled them in on this issue.
LOW PRIORITY
Hi CUSTOMER,
Just a heads up that I’ll be out of office beginning tomorrow and will come back X. I can continue to help you after I return, but if you need more immediate assistance with this, please email my team at support@gem.com so that one of my colleagues can help out.