Faulty information transfer. As numerous service issues pass from one level to another, information can be misinterpreted or even lost. Say, L1 agents didn’t give a thorough description to a problem they escalated, which made L2 agents additionally hammer the details out and even reach back to end users to obtain more info on the ticket. Thus, ticket resolution time increased, spoiling user satisfaction.

Support specialists’ burnout. In multitiered IT support, Tier 1 agents can get tired of answering the same simple questions and solving the same basic issues. Poor coordination between levels is another reason for stress and burnout. For example, a Tier 1 specialist escalates a problem to Tier 2 and doesn’t get a response for several hours, while a user keeps pressuring them about the ticket. As for the specialists at higher tiers (Tiers 2 and 3), they can experience additional stress from solving complicated issues in rough time frames. As a result, the engagement of the support staff across tiers falls, and agents fail to deliver high-quality support.

Agents’ irresponsibility. Knowing that they can transfer a service ticket to another level, support agents may become less responsible and try to get rid of their tickets instead of investigating them thoroughly.

First Response Time (FRT) typically relates to L1 support team’s performance and measures the period between receiving a support ticket and responding to the end user. A very high FRT may evidence that your L1 agents are insufficiently competent or their knowledge base should be updated as it lacks important info on resolving service issues.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is usually based on a short survey that users fill out after talking to a support specialist or when a ticket is resolved. For the support team, this metric shows the quality of the delivered service, points at the drawbacks in the knowledge base and even helps to detect agents’ irresponsibility.

First contact resolution (FCR) shows the percentage of issues solved as soon as a user contacted support about their problem. Although this parameter depends on the complexity of tickets, a low FCR may help to spot poorly established L1 support: for example, L1 agents are overloaded or not trained properly to use the scripts for problem resolution.

Establish effective self-support at Level 0. Reliable self-support materials can help lower your service ticket volumes as users will be able to solve problems without contacting support and in the way they find convenient. And what’s especially important, such materials can reduce the number of simple cases that your L1 agents have to deal with. This will consequently improve L1 specialists’ job satisfaction as well as their overall productivity. However, creating a knowledge base once and for all doesn’t work. It should be enriched with fresh materials as soon as supported applications are updated or the support team finds a solution to a new problem that can be further tackled independently by end users.

Solve as much as possible at L1. You need to provide the L1 team with carefully prepared scripts for solving various software problems to cover as many service tickets as possible without involving L2. Meanwhile, the L2 team deals with the more complex tasks: say, fixing the problems of software and hardware interoperability or conducting log investigations. And as L2 agents solve new kinds of issues, they can create new scripts to enable L1 specialist to solve similar tasks on their own. Such a practice can reduce long queues of tickets waiting for L2 support and increase first-contact resolution rates.

Integrate L1 and L2 to provide fast and accurate responses for most cases. If you offer specific software for a narrow circle of end users (for example, software for analyzing chemical composition), your team is expected to receive fewer service tickets than a team supporting more common products. However, the majority of reported issues about software usage require IT expertise, which presupposes L2 and L3 participation. In this case, it makes sense to combine L1 and L2 support. In combined L1/L2 support, one team manages a service ticket without ticket reassignment, and service tickets get to L3 quicker when required. Also, you can assign specialization to the L1/L2 team members so that tickets go directly to those with the most suitable skill sets.

Ensure that you have enough agents at each level. An understaffed support level becomes a serious bottleneck to efficient ticket processing. For example, if you don’t have enough L1 agents, even simple issues will be processed with delays. And if you need to reduce general issue resolution time, you may require more L2 and L3 specialists to tackle the issues of higher complexity. However, don’t rush to hire new personnel: the demand for additional support agents may arise only at certain periods, for example, 3 months after a product release or update. In this case, outsourced IT support can be a good option.

Appoint the right number of specialists at each tier.

Prepare comprehensive knowledge materials for agents as well as end users.

Wisely allocate duties and responsibilities in the support team.