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Would like to hear other's input on how to best address a sales team continuing to "escalate" our support team, even within minutes of informing us of an issue or request.
I have a lot of energy here so please bear with me....
Let me provide y'all with some background. I am the Team Lead in an operations group that supports Project Managers and Sales teams. The sales teams get the opportunities, the PMs build the projects, and we support customer loads, tool and environment issues, and user requests on a daily basis. Our SLA with anyone is that we will respond to a request within 4 business hours. Usually, we respond within one hour, but have some leeway in case we're following a major issue and aren't able to respond immediately due to that larger issue.
In this environment, we have a standard policy where everyone is to send any issues to a single, group watched email address. While we don't "live" in that email account (ie, Mark's suggestion about not "doing email" all day), we check it at least once an hour or more to make sure that we start working quickly on any issues that come in. My team does an excellent job of responding to concerns within the agreed upon time frames even if we can't immediately solve the issue for the team. We communicate with them the plan for resolution, even if it's only just the next step as we are unsure where the root of the issue lies.
We have had many instances over the past two years where our team is informed of an issue and then our management team (Program Manager and regular Manager) is informed of the issue and asked for their assistance in getting the issue immediately resolved. Sometimes, the Sales team informs the management team of issues before they even inform us. Our management team isn't the best, but they always do respond to emails from the Sales team, though usually by first responding to us asking us about the status of the issue or request. The management team along with our team have been working through a lot of issues that were outside of our control that have decreased the Sales team's confidence in the tools we support. The situation has improved greatly with a >50% reduction in issues YOY in the last quarter of 2010. (Yes, that's an accomplishment on my CMD... :) )
While we're doing great work, we feel that when several members of the sales team consistently go to the management team and escalate every issue as soon as they raise it, this behavior only drives a wedge between our team and the sales team. We don't feel that we have given them any reason to continue to escalate every single request or issue sent to the group mailbox. In years past, I have asked those sales team members that are repeat offenders to please provide us time before escalating the issues and they just respond that they are trying to get the issue as much attention as possible. We have asked our management team to talk to that team about this behavior. I do not think that those conversations have happened. I'm to the point that I want to take this into my own hands directly with several of the members of the sales team. However, I have a lot of "energy" around this point, and don't want to come at it unprofessionally.
What suggestions do those with cooler and smarter heads than mine have to suggest so that we can start to work better with the sales team and not be "escalated" for every issue that some members of the sales team bring to us? Peer Feedback? "Get over it" as it's the other team's personality types? Something else?
I look forward to your input!!
- Scott
Let it go.
It sounds like you've made great strides to improve service levels. Well done. Keep it up. Sounds as well like you did it the right way... nicely done indeed.
Now don't blow it by expecting every salesperson to act as if nothing was ever bad, or that their working the system (that's how they would describe it) is somehow ill-advised.
Yep, some of them don't get it, and are making things hard for you. They will always be there. Don't allow those few to play a bigger role than they ought to relative to how you define your relationship with the sales force.
The way you can work better with these folks is ignore their escalations (in terms of trying to stop them, or crying foul. JUST BE QUIET ABOUT IT. Part of it is them...that's just how some sales people are. And ...keep in mind, sales gets away with more traditionally, because sales are sort of related to revenue and revenue to salaries.
And, part of it is just the inevitable friction that happens between internal customers and support functions.
One thing I would double check is your use of metrics to show the kind of response you guys have achieved. When someone is always complaining, but the folks that they're complaining to know that you're at 98.9% of your SLA, those managers tend to ignore the whining. YOu'll have to have data...and it sounds like you do.
And don't tolerate anyone saying, "oh, that's just Johnny Sales/Whiner-Boy again." That's not professional when said out loud. Quash it profesionally.
Keep up the good work, and let this go. Even the best wine has some bitterness. It's the nature of things.
Mark