Earlier this month I had the opportunity to sit down with Patrick Martin, VP of Technical Support at Coveo, and discuss how case swarming has been a big part of Coveo’s incredibly efficient support operations model. Patrick had some great advice, and also provided a quick demonstration of how Coveo’s swarming model works in real time. It was a great “sequel” of sorts to an awesome conversation I had in a previous TSIA webinar with Marilyn Lin (formerly of Mulesoft and now VP of Global Customer Support at Delphix) to discuss her recently implemented swarming model. 

While only about one third of support organizations use a single-tier model with or without case swarming, according to TSIA. The concept is growing in popularity among many support teams. Why?  Well, single tier can reduce complexity, speed agent onboarding times, and increase customer satisfaction. When agents put a case out to swarm, they are opening up the resolution process to greater expertise – so the customer benefits from a speedier, more informed response. 

In our discussion, Patrick outlined how he made some simple, yet highly effective tweaks to a pre-existing single-tier model at Coveo. By adding a streamlined approach to the entire swarming process, including how agents access and author knowledge content, the team has embraced the new model – leading to significant reductions in mean time to resolution. In fact, time to resolution for collaborative/swarmed cases improved by nearly 20% post implementation.

For those looking to implement a swarming model – Patrick had some wise words of advice:

•When it’s everyone’s responsibility, it’s no one’s responsibility: make sure to build measurement and accountability into the model

•Context switching is ever present in Support. If you are to move to a swarming model, you have to find ways to avoid creating more opportunities to draw people’s attention on areas they cannot add value

•Targeted and focused collaboration through swarming drives significant results in operational performance and employee engagement – shorter resolution times and improved ESAT!

This short clip outlines the huge benefits Coveo saw in its swarming initiative:

All in all, it was a great talk, and it was great to get a hands-on view of the swarming model from Patrick’s demo. You can access a replay of our discussion HERE. 

You can also learn more about Coveo’s use of SupportLogic’s SX Assign intelligent case assignment (which helps power some of Coveo’s seamless swarming) which helped reduce mean time to resolution by over 50% by reading Coveo’s case study. 

Want to see how intelligent case assignment, escalation prediction and SupportLogic’s other features can work for your support team?  Request a demo of SupportLogic today.