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Coda on Coda - Working with Engineering
Coda on Coda - Working with Engineering

Even if you’re a super talented Customer Champion, like our very own Thomas Hils, sometimes you need to pull in an engineer to troubleshoot an issue. The connection between Support and Engineering also contributes to what the future of your product looks like, and the learning can be incredible. That’s why Thomas was tasked with building a (spoiler alert!) Coda doc to help the Engineering and Support teams collaborate on solving customer issues.

You can catch the full conversation here:

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Thomas’s doc has three main areas:

Customer Champion space

Engineer space

Thomas’s overview space

It all starts in Intercom

My favorite part about Thomas’s doc is that the process gets kicked off by a Customer Champion adding a tag to an Intercom conversation. People can escalate items manually with a button too, but this process (enabled by Zapier) means that Customer Champions don’t need to switch between tabs to flag an issue.

They’ll then see all the issues in a special view that’s filtered by each user so the Champions can monitor progress on an issue:

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What the engineer saw

Once a Customer Champion flags an issue, it’s added to the Triage table. Here, the on-call engineer can review the cases. Thomas made this easier through the power of buttons:

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Intercom — This button opens up the intercom conversation associated with the issue

Detail — This button opens the row for a more focused reading experience

Claim — This button adds the ticket to the engineer’s queue to resolve

Return — Even Champions make mistakes. This button allows an engineer to say that the issue is not a bug. The issue then gets added to the Champions Returned tickets view.

What I love about these buttons is that they enable people to quickly triage issues from a computer, but also a mobile device since these become swipe actions on a phone.

Once items are claimed, the engineer can work through their dashboard and even mark when they are waiting for a customer response:

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Thomas’s Bat Cave

As the owner of this doc, Thomas also wanted an area where he could monitor overall progress and report out on general trends. He created a folder with various sections depending on what he needed to review:

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Meet the new intern — Coda

Thomas also employs the Gmail pack to allow him to report quickly to the team about trends. One section is populated with formulas that summarize how the team is performing:

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He then uses an automation and the Gmail pack to email this section out for the team. Better yet, he built in Slack reminders so he doesn’t need to nag the team or send reminders. Coda enforces all of the agreement the team built together.