When multiple customers report similar problems, closing a single work order does not mean that the root cause has disappeared. The customer service system should allow the team to identify common problems while retaining the independent responsibility of each customer.

Start from needs

Associate problem sets by product, version or business theme, and designate the person responsible for the root cause; a single work order displays the association progress, and allows recording of different impacts and processing results.

Things that should be paid attention to in the design

For example, if multiple users encounter the same export exception, joint troubleshooting items can be established; each customer’s notification and recovery confirmation are still executed individually, and all work orders cannot be closed with one click.

For example, handle it like this

Check whether the topic matching is mistakenly associated, and check whether the root cause is confirmed one by one after being solved; the summary report indicates the source of the scope of impact, so as to avoid directly treating similar descriptions as the same fault.

Check the processing results item by item

  • Common problems can have independent diagnosis status and repair records, and associated work orders retain the impact scope and verification results of each customer.
  • Similar keywords are only candidate clues. Different products, usage conditions or failure times require manual confirmation.
  • After the person in charge of the root cause updates the progress, customer service can explain the confirmed facts to the customer accordingly, and the undetermined recovery time should not be written as a promise.
  • After the repair is completed, it is necessary to check whether the specific customer has been restored. Some environments may require another step of processing.
  • Retain the person responsible for the unresolved work orders, and they cannot be automatically closed due to the closure of common issues.
  • Record during the review when the temporary detour measures will be terminated to prevent customers from continuing to use operations that are no longer needed.

Check the processing results

Notifications of common issues should be consistent with the confirmed progress, and speculations in internal discussions should not be written to customers. If the diagnosis direction changes, record the reason and update the customer service instructions so that the front line does not continue to disseminate the excluded explanation.