When you’re working in support, not everything that’s hard is hard for the same reason. Some tasks are complex because they involve too many steps. Others are simple but repetitive, and some are just plain dangerous. A few are exclusive: only understood by the most experienced teammates, and others get stuck waiting on someone from a different department to do their part.
If you want to improve how your support team works, you need to develop a kind of radar for spotting which tasks and processes should be automated.
Here are five common patterns you should look for:
- Repetitive: tasks that are real soul-killers
- Slow: tasks that take a lot of time
- Complex: tasks only senior teammates can do
- Risky: tasks that can break things and ruin the day
- Stuck-able: tasks that get blocked waiting for other teams’ feedback
Let’s take a quick look at each of these:
1. Repetitive, soul-killing tasks
You probably know these: they seem too “simple” to automate, but they’re done dozens of times a day and take a surprising toll on people. They’re usually assigned to the most junior teammates, and they eat up hours while draining morale because of their repetitive nature.
Example: we used to run PageSpeed reports manually for every ticket and write custom insights for each one. After doing 20 or 30 of those per day, it was demolishing. So we built a tool that assisted in automating most of the repetitive parts of the process while keeping the human touch. It didn’t remove the human; quite the opposite, it sped up things, creating space to provide much better insights after removing the pain of repetition.
You should look out for tasks that:
- Take 40 minutes but feel like 4 hours
- Require copy-pasting the same thing 50 times
- They are simple, but done 20 times per day
- You can feel the collective pain when someone brings them up in a meeting
Even automating part of the task can improve team happiness and reduce burnout
2. Slow tasks, those that take a lot of time
Some processes are just inefficient. The team knows they work, but they eat up time when done manually. These could be anything: setup steps, test “rituals”, logging and troubleshooting, data preparation…
The question to ask here is: “What if we didn’t do it this way? What if we create a new method?”
Example: We used to manually clone HTML into WordPress templates from a given URL to run tests. That meant opening the page, copying the source, pasting it into a PHP template, adding a couple WordPress functions in the right places, assigning it to a post, clearing the cache, running our tests, and after we finished deleting the template. It worked, but it was time-consuming, So, we created a helper plugin where you can paste the URL into an input, click submit, and everything is created for us.
Sometimes we stick to a method just out of habit or history. It’s good to take a step back and think: why don’t we try a different approach?
3. Complex tasks only senior teammates can do
Keep an eye where senior teammates (Tier 2 or Tier 3) are being pulled in like “support wizards”. If only one person can do it, that’s not a strength, it’s a bottleneck.
These are usually complex troubleshooting steps, database operations, undocumented tests, etc. By automating them, or even creating internal tools that guide the process, you:
- Free up senior teammates to focus on more valuable work
- Empower junior teammates to handle more and be more autonomous
- Reduce silos and knowledge imbalance across the team
Example: Logging via FTP and adding some error_log statements into specific lines of a plugin file, to understand what information is being passed between functions can be an advanced task. So, we found the most common logs that where usually made by Tier2s and created a quick checkboxes interface to get that information in a readable way, without even have to access via FTP.
Remember seniors also get tired of repeating the same tasks, is not fair for anyone to become a bottleneck or a silo, people don’t want that, it feels overwhelming and stressful.
4. Risky tasks that shouldn’t be done manually
These are the ones that can do real damage if something happens. One mistake, and you’re in damage control. These are stressful, both for the teammate doing them and for whoever has to clean up the mess. Things like:
- Truncating a database table
- Editing files via FTP
- Access the site database to search for information
If something has a big red flag moment (“Are you sure you want to do this?”), it’s probably a good candidate for automation, or at least for being wrapped in a safer interface: a button, a checkbox, something!
Example: When our plugin incorporated MySql tables to store information, in many tickets we had to start running MySql queries such as TRUNCATE. This created tension, because you had to go in and manually run these, imagine choosing the wrong table!!!! So, we wrapped the most common actions in a set of buttons; this reduced the risk to 0 and made the fear go away.
Making risky tasks safer is good for everyone: the team, the customer, and the heart rate.
5. Stuck-able: tasks that get blocked waiting for other teams’ feedback
Some tasks aren’t hard, but get stuck. Maybe you need Engineering to check something, or Product to validate it. Meanwhile, the customer is waiting, the agent is waiting, and nothing moves.
So when you see repeating patterns, is fair to ask: can we make this self-serve?
Example: Support needed to check the connectivity between a customer website and our SaaS servers, but only engineering had access. Eventually, they exposed an endpoint, and we built a Postman request so we could check it ourselves. Not fancy, not complex, but it worked
Even if you can’t automate the whole thing, automating just your side of the process, or making a tool to send a cleaner request, can save days.
Postdata
We all like lists, so I choose 5 patters for this article, but the list is long as there are more patterns waiting to be detected.
So if you want to know what to automate, don’t just look at what’s slow or inefficient. Look at what’s painful. Look at what’s frustrating. Look at what scares people. Look at what only one person knows how to do.
Then ask: what would a lazy person do here? That’s usually where the good things start.
Leave a Reply