Using Turnaround Time to Make Customers Happy

We can classify requests coming from other teams into two categories critical and non-critical. Critical requests are the requests on which other teams are blocked and cannot proceed further in their work. It is important therefore to unblock them so that it does not have cascading effect on project timelines as it is possible that there are other teams that are dependent on the them making the request. Non-critical requests can be any other request that doesn't need immediate attention. While it may not need immediate attention it is important to respond to them in time bound fashion as well for smooth working of projects.

Customer queries are unique in the sense that they can directly impact the revenue and reputation of the company and therefore should be responded in time bound fashion. In some cases TAT of customer queries can also be part of SLA between customer and parent organization so it is important that teams respond on time. Further since these queries requires communicating with external organizations it may invole other departments like legal or PR as well which would further add to the delay even if the development teams respond on time so the response time should accomodate these factors as well.

To properly utilize triage charts we need to ensure that tasks are tagged correctly with "external" and "customer" tags to indicate that request is coming from external teams or customers. Here "external" and "customer" tags are given as example you should use whatever labels are used in your organization. Once tags are in place triage charts gives the details of overall TAT for triage tasks as well as TAT for individual tags. We can check TAT and measure the responsiveness of teams to external teams as well as customers.

We should next set the responsiveness goals for teams so that TAT falls within this range and monitor triage charts at some fixed schedule to track if goals are met and take corrective action in case there is deviation.