Learn more about Industry's First DevOps Solution For Customer Support
What is a DevOps solution in customer support?
A DevOps solution for customer support, often referred to as “SupportOps,” is an approach that applies DevOps principles and practices to customer service operations. It involves streamlining support workflows, enhancing collaboration between support, development, and operations teams, and using automation and technology to deliver faster and more efficient customer support. The goal is to provide exceptional service, improve issue resolution, and ensure a seamless and satisfying customer experience. SupportOps extends the core DevOps values of culture, automation, and collaboration into the realm of customer support operations to create a more agile, customer-centric approach to serving and satisfying customers.
Adopting a DevOps approach in customer support requires a cultural shift, as well as the adoption of agile teams and project management practices to foster collaboration and continuous improvement. Organizations looking to adopt DevOps in customer support must embrace this cultural shift and integrate project management and agile teams to ensure effective collaboration and incremental delivery.
DevOps Lifecycle and Automation in Customer Support
The DevOps lifecycle is a continuous process that brings together development and operations teams to accelerate software development and ensure high-quality software delivery. By fostering close collaboration between development and operations teams, organizations can streamline development and operations processes, leading to faster and more reliable releases.
Automation is at the heart of the DevOps lifecycle. Through continuous integration and continuous delivery, teams can automate the building, testing, and deployment of software, significantly reducing manual tasks and minimizing the risk of human error. Deployment automation further ensures that new features and updates are delivered seamlessly, allowing operations teams to maintain stability and performance in production environments.
In the context of customer support, applying DevOps automation enables support teams to respond more quickly to issues, as updates and fixes can be deployed rapidly without manual intervention. Automated processes also provide real-time visibility into the status of software and services, empowering support agents to deliver timely and accurate information to customers. By integrating these DevOps practices into customer support workflows, organizations can enhance efficiency, improve the customer experience, and ensure that support operations keep pace with the fast-moving world of software development.
The Challenge - DevOps disconnect between development and operations teams and frontline support
In SaaS companies, especially those “born in the cloud” with modern public cloud SaaS stack with In, DevOps has the mission-critical charter to ensure continuous delivery and high quality of service while shortening the software development lifecycle. DevOps teams increasingly rely on full stack Application Monitoring (APM) tools as well as alerting and notification platforms to monitor the health of the services being delivered. While the level of sophistication and granularity of monitoring capabilities has progressed a lot, unfortunately, it remains siloed within DevOps teams and engineering. Improved collaboration between development teams and frontline support can help bridge this gap and ensure that critical information flows seamlessly across functions.
Frontline support, customer success, and product teams do not have visibility to service disruptions or degradation in real-time - thus making it difficult for them to respond appropriately to support tickets coming from customers as a result of service disruption or degradation. Product teams often miss out on understanding patterns of service degradation or disruptions. Incorporating continuous feedback and customer feedback from support interactions is essential for informing product and support improvements. Thus, enhancements related to Quality of Service (QOS) rarely make it to the roadmap priorities. QoS is the blindspot for product teams, and “feature bombing” often overshadows the basics of SaaS - uptime and quality, compounded by the lack of ability to generate reports that analyze the impact of service issues on customers.
DevOps Tools Solution for Customer Support
The emergence of AI-powered Support Operations is designed to break down the siloed world of DevOps and Support, thereby empowering frontline support teams and customer success teams with real-time insights into the quality of service as well as customer-impacting service degradation or disruptions. Similarly, product teams are able to recognize QOS and any patterns that can help them shape their roadmaps for better uptime and service quality.
IrisAgent integrates seamlessly with the broader DevOps toolchain to streamline deployment processes and application deployment, enabling organizations to automate the deployment process, manage infrastructure, and deliver software reliably to production systems. The platform supports version control, source control, and CI/CD practices, integrating with different tools—including open source tools—to enable automated builds, secure software delivery, and efficient management of code changes. Its integration with open source and best DevOps tools enables high availability, load balancing, and improved software architecture. IrisAgent also encourages community contributions through pull requests and supports static code analysis and security practices to ensure secure software.
To that effect, IrisAgent—the leading AI-powered Support Operations platform—delivers the following key capabilities:
Pre-built, secure, and certified integration with leading alerting and notification tool - PagerDuty. Integrated with PagerDuty Plays, it pushes critical DevOps alerts to CRM systems like Salesforce Service Deck, Zendesk, and Intercom.
DevOps alerts pushed to CRM systems via the IrisAgent platform are enriched with keyword tagging. This enables quick co-relations to open new inbound tickets.
The ability for Support Agents to quickly search against DevOps alerts and co-relate them to open tickets
Proactive alerts inside CRM as “Known service issues” are visible to all support and CSM personnel inside CRM tools.
Supports automated tests and configuration management to ensure reliable code changes and manage infrastructure efficiently.
Leverages internal developer platforms and platform engineering principles to enhance developer productivity and support the management of virtual machines and cloud resources.
Helps organizations manage their IT infrastructure, automate deployment processes, and deliver software efficiently to production systems.
A report that
Summarizes overall impact of service degradation/outage on customers
Summary of how many customers reported tickets associated with service degradation/outage to customers
Revenue impact, as derived from CRM data.
Benefits of IrisAgent's DevOps solution for software development in customer support
IrisAgent’s DevOps solutions in customer support offer numerous advantages:
Efficient Issue Resolution: DevOps practices streamline support processes, enabling faster and more efficient issue resolution, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.
Enhanced Collaboration: Collaboration between support, development, and operations teams ensures a more holistic and effective approach to solving customer issues. The solution enables teams to work more effectively and supports agile teams in delivering better outcomes through improved collaboration.
Automation:Automation reduces manual tasks, minimizes errors, and speeds up support operations, leading to quicker responses to customer inquiries. Automation also enables teams to accelerate software development and deployment by streamlining key tasks.
Improved Customer Experience: The proactive and personalized approach of DevOps solutions enhances the overall customer experience, fostering loyalty and trust.
Cost Efficiency: Automation and process improvements reduce support costs, optimizing resource allocation and handling times.
Data-Driven Decision-Making: Data analytics and insights help make informed decisions, continuously improving the quality of support services. The platform helps generate reports and gather continuous feedback and customer feedback to drive ongoing improvements.
Scalability and Productivity: SupportOps ensures that support services can scale to meet increasing customer demand. The solution also enhances developer productivity and supports improved collaboration across teams.
Cultural Alignment: Promoting a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility results in a more unified approach to customer support within the organization.
In summary, DevOps solutions in customer support drive efficiency, collaboration, and automation, resulting in a more seamless and customer-centric support experience that benefits both the organization and its customers.In an industry-first, the IrisAgent AI-powered Support operations platform now delivers actionable DevOps information to frontline support, customer success, and product teams. Current customers and prospects can now enable this capability by signing up or dropping us a note.
