In my job I am responsible for putting customer fires out on the daily. Since I'm part of the Severity 1 team, some of those customers have been international ones from France, the UK, and Asia Pacific, among others. When I get those cases, the customer usually sends them during the end of their work shift so I'm not always able to connect with them.
If I'm not able to connect with them and they didn't provide a way for me to access their system or enough information about the issue, I'm limited on what can be done. You would surprised by the number of cases received that just says the bare minimum with absolutely no details. The description just says for example, "this is not working".
In those situations we are responsible for meeting the SLA, or Service Level Agreement. The SLA simply is the contract between the service provider (my company) and the consumer which defines the expected level of service in the event issues arise.
When we receive Severity 1 cases from those customers who pay for premium service, the service provider is expected to send out an initial response within the hour. There are automation processes in place that will send you a warning message, if you have less than 30 minutes to respond. You'll even get a human who will message you and say that you're in danger of not meeting the SLA. Those messages are always so annoying especially if I'm in the middle of reviewing the issue. Incidentally if that's the only job those folks have, where do I sign up? *LOL*.
There are times when it takes time for the case to be assigned and when you receive it, you have less than 20 minutes to meet the SLA. That's when you have to quickly give a generic response before time runs out.
Once the SLA is met, there's pretty much nothing else you can do for that particular case. There are plenty of other fires from U.S. customers to keep me busy. Near the end of my shift, for those cases, I would fill out a template with what little details I received, and then transfer the case to our general queue and directly route it to my European or Asian Pacific or India counterparts.
There are situations though where we are able to reach the international customer and obtain details. I even had a case this past week, where the International customer opened the Severity 1 case near the end of the day and left excellent details about their issue. They also gave me access to their system to investigate. They weren't available to chat but I had what I needed.
I was able to immediately narrow down on the issue but I still needed time to verify that the issue indeed was what I suspected. This involved testing the scenario in my personal work org. I also had other fires to put out as well throughout the day.
I finally had some time about an hour before my shift ended. I was able to confirm my first instincts were correct. But since the customer was International, I had to decide whether to keep the case in my queue or transfer it to the customer's time zone. I was certain that I figured out the issue but I felt like the customer may have had additional questions and if they responded on the case and I wasn't available (because it was outside my shift), it would sit there all day during their shift without a response (unless the customer escalated the case, which would be a bad thing). Best case scenario, the customer would close out the ticket or give permission to close.
I decided to transfer the case. I checked on the ticket the next day and the customer did indeed respond that it was fine to close which the current assigned engineer did. We receive credit on cases when they are closed. Whoever is the case owner at time of close gets the credit. Since I didn't own the case anymore, I didn't receive credit even though I was the one that resolved the issue.
During those times I felt like an unsung hero. I lamented about it briefly to a co-worker who could relate. On the flipside I've had some international cases where I was completely stumped and was so happy to pass those off. It's all part of the game.
