Support Lead Playbook
A practical guide for support leads to implement AI automation in your support operations. Low-code workflows that you can own with light technical oversight.
Getting Started
Who This Is For
Support leads, customer success managers, and operations managers who want to automate support workflows without deep technical expertise. This playbook assumes you're comfortable with tools like Slack, Zendesk, and basic workflow concepts.
What You'll Learn
- • How to identify automation opportunities in your support workflows
- • Step-by-step guides for common support automations
- • How to work with engineering to set up integrations
- • Best practices for maintaining and improving automated workflows
Common Support Workflows
Ticket Triage and Routing
Automatically classify and route incoming support tickets to the right team.
Implementation Steps:
- Identify ticket types that can be automatically classified
- Work with engineering to set up email/webhook integration
- Define routing rules based on ticket content
- Test with sample tickets and refine rules
- Monitor accuracy and adjust as needed
Customer Information Enrichment
Automatically fetch customer context from CRM and internal systems.
Implementation Steps:
- Identify what customer information is needed for support
- Map data sources (CRM, billing, product usage)
- Configure automatic data fetching on ticket creation
- Display enriched context in support tool
- Train team on using enriched information
Escalation Workflows
Automatically escalate tickets based on priority, SLA, or customer tier.
Implementation Steps:
- Define escalation criteria (time, priority, customer tier)
- Set up escalation rules in Semawork
- Configure notifications for escalations
- Test escalation scenarios
- Monitor and refine escalation logic
Intelligent Triage Implementation
Ticket Classification Logic
The triage system uses AI to analyze ticket content and classify tickets by type, urgency, and required expertise. Classification considers keywords, sentiment, customer tier, historical patterns, and ticket characteristics. The system learns from routing corrections to improve accuracy over time. Classification logic can be customized based on your support structure and ticket types.
Classification logic enables accurate routing by understanding ticket intent and requirements. The system improves accuracy over time through learning from corrections.
Routing Rules Configuration
Configure routing rules based on ticket classification, team expertise, workload, and customer tier. Routing considers factors like team capacity, on-call schedules, and historical resolution patterns. Rules can be configured to route technical issues to engineering, billing questions to finance, and feature requests to product teams. This configuration enables accurate routing while maintaining flexibility.
Routing rules configuration enables support leads to control ticket routing without requiring engineering changes. This empowers support teams to optimize routing based on their needs.
Context Enrichment
The triage system enriches tickets with customer context from CRM, billing systems, and product usage data. This enrichment provides agents with complete context before they begin working on tickets, enabling faster resolution. Context includes customer history, contract details, product usage, and previous interactions.
Escalation Procedures and Logic
Time-Based Escalation
Configure automatic escalation based on ticket age, ensuring tickets don't languish in queues. When tickets aren't resolved within configured timeframes, the system automatically escalates to senior team members or managers. Escalation thresholds can be configured based on ticket priority, customer tier, and SLA requirements.
Time-based escalation ensures timely resolution and prevents tickets from getting stuck. This proactive escalation maintains service levels and improves customer satisfaction.
Priority-Based Escalation
High-priority tickets automatically escalate to senior team members or managers immediately. Priority escalation ensures critical issues receive immediate attention. The system can identify high-priority tickets based on keywords, customer tier, issue severity, or manual priority assignment.
Priority-based escalation ensures critical issues receive appropriate attention. This escalation maintains service levels for high-priority customers and issues.
Customer Tier Escalation
Enterprise or high-value customers receive escalated support automatically. The system routes tickets from high-tier customers to senior support staff and ensures faster response times. Customer tier escalation ensures premium customers receive appropriate service levels.
Customer tier escalation ensures appropriate service levels for different customer segments. This escalation maintains customer relationships and reduces churn risk.
Escalation Notification and Tracking
The system sends escalation notifications through multiple channels including Slack, email, and support tools. Escalation notifications include ticket context, escalation reason, and required actions. The system tracks escalation patterns to identify areas where processes might need improvement.
Co-Ownership Model
Semawork is designed for co-ownership between support teams and engineers. Engineering handles the initial integration setup, while support leads configure and maintain workflows.
Engineering Responsibilities
- • Initial integration setup with tools
- • API authentication and security
- • Core infrastructure and monitoring
- • Technical troubleshooting
Support Lead Responsibilities
- • Workflow configuration and rules
- • Testing and refinement
- • Team training and adoption
- • Ongoing optimization
Ready to automate your support operations?
Let's discuss how Semawork can help you automate support workflows with co-ownership between your team and engineering.