Vanta Support under the hood: Efficiency powered by Intelligent Swarming℠

There is nothing that makes me happier than sharing with our customers that our Technical Support Team at Vanta truly puts them first. What if I told you that whenever you reach out to us, you will get the best Support agent to resolve your question, ideally on first contact, that you won't be bounced around, and that this knowledgeable person will stay with you till the end.

We took our collaborative way to help our customers to the next level by implementing Intelligent Swarming℠, an efficient and smarter way to align resources to work that focuses on the customer while increasing the upskilling speed and the engagement of the team.

Intelligent Swarming vs Tiered Support

• Intelligent Swarming is based on the fundamental principle of prioritizing the customer's desired experience, which is to promptly connect with a capable Support agent who can efficiently address their inquiries on the first interaction and stay with them until a satisfactory resolution is achieved.
• Intelligent Swarming eliminates the limitations of the Tier Support model, which often requires customers to navigate through multiple tiers of support before reaching a satisfactory resolution. This approach can lead to unnecessary escalation of tickets to higher tiers, resulting in the customer being passed from one support agent to the next, leading to a less than optimal experience.
• The Tiered Support model creates a knowledge gap between tiers because it can be challenging to keep track of escalated tickets and learn from their resolutions, even with the best intentions.
• Lower support tiers typically have more resources available than higher tiers, as the complexity of questions tends to increase with escalation. This bottleneck at the higher tiers can result in longer wait and resolution times for customers, which can lead to a less than satisfactory experience.
• A robust Knowledge Base is the backbone of Intelligent Swarming, as it enables the Knowledge Base to address known issues while Intelligent Swarming handles new ones. To achieve this, we implemented the KCS® methodology.

Intelligent Swarming Benefits

Intelligent Swarming offers numerous benefits, including enhanced customer experience, reduced customer effort, faster upskilling, improved response and resolution times, increased employee engagement, and knowledge creation.

Metrics

Adopting Intelligent Swarming (and KCS) requires a mindset shift for the entire team to prioritize value creation over activity focus and emphasize knowledge creation and collaboration rather than just ticket resolution. Two of the six core concepts of Intelligent Swarming emphasize this shift in mindset:

• Work is Work : Work is any activity that creates value and contributes to success

• Recognize contribution : Recognize the creation of value by individuals and teams

Intelligent Swarming at Vanta

At Vanta Support, we took several foundational steps to prepare for Intelligent Swarming, including:

• Upskilling and updating the skillset profile of our team to meet the current and future needs of our customers. As we build a robust Knowledge Base for our customers to self-serve, the questions coming to us increases in complexity.
• Establishing a Knowledge Base and adopting KCS practices to facilitate just-in-time KB creation.
• Creating SME (Subject Matter Expert) Teams aligned with our product areas to foster continued expertise development within the team and facilitate cross-functional collaboration with Product and Engineering.

Intelligent Swarming Implementation at Vanta

Intelligent Swarming goes beyond Collaboration, its framework includes the Connect and Recognize practices as well.

Source: Consortium for Services Innovation (tm)

For the Connect practice, we make all tickets visible by SME area to make fast connections between work and the support agent most likely to solve on first touch, if help is needed, the support agent will call for a swarm.

For the Collaborate practice,  the support agent triggers a swarm request to seek assistance from anyone with the relevant knowledge while maintaining ownership of the ticket until a resolution is reached. Support agents will swarm with other SMEs within Support and with Engineers outside Support.

The Recognize practice involves acknowledging the contributions of anyone who assisted in resolving the issue. Swarming is captured within our ticketing and chat systems.

For more information on Intelligent Swarming and KCS go to:

Intelligent Swarming Overview

Intelligent Swarming Practices Guide

Knowledge Centered Service (KCS)

Acknowledgements

Big Thanks to the Consortium for Service Innovation for their Intelligent Swarming and KCS methodologies and their great documentation and insights.

Intelligent Swarming℠ is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation™.

KCS® is a service mark of the Consortium for Service InnovationTM.