Confluence for Support Teams

Confluence helps serve a number of different roles for teams, and while mainly it’s used as a collaboration platform, it also helps fill a big need for Support teams - that of a knowledge base.

Source of truth

One of the most successful uses of Confluence I’ve seen was being the source of truth for an HR support team. This group was responsible for triaging 100,000+ tickets every year ranging in topics from onboarding to benefits to recruiting across dozens of countries. This made for a very large range of tickets that any given agent could end up handling, making training and onboarding very challenging.

The team had two dedicated individuals whose main job was to keep Confluence updated. They would constantly review documentation, tickets, feedback from folks and other information to ensure that every possible ticket the team might get was thoroughly documented. They included screenshots, escalation paths, background information and more all in one spot. This meant that any team member could easily look up a particular type of ticket and get everything they needed to answer it.

While not every team will have the luxury of dedicated knowledge managers, having a single place to store everything - especially one that is integrated with your ticketing system - makes resolving tickets much easier. Agents won’t waste time having to dig through different systems - everything is in one spot. I’ve seen teams benefit from this by rotating the responsibility of creating updates between agents. This spreads out the load (preventing the need for a dedicated headcount), but also gives each agent some experience building the knowledge base. This can be a great break from grinding through tickets, and also expose agents to other areas they may not have been exposed to before.

Standardization

Leveraging Confluence had the added benefit of ensuring everything was standardized. The same templates were used, the same labelling and naming schemes, the same headers etc. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal, it had some great benefits. Team members always knew what to expect when they opened specific types of pages, and the consistent labelling and naming drastically improved search.

Something as simple as using the same templates for similar information had a huge impact. Not only did it speed up creation (as editors didn’t have to fight with formatting/etc) it made it easier for agents looking up information as they know what to look for when they opened a page. Templates were also setup with standard labels, making it effortless to include them appropriately in search (and tie in with other macros like content-by-label).

Jira Integration

Much of a support team's work will be in Jira managing tickets. Fortunately, Jira and Confluence are highly integrated, and can serve up articles to customers (helping deflect tickets) but also directly to agents as they work on them. This helps speed up their ability to resolve tickets by serving up information directly to them. Having a well-maintained setup amplifies this as labelling and search will be cleaner, ensuring the appropriate information is given to them.

The Jira integration also makes it easy to link tickets to specific pages. This can support post-mortem and retrospectives as related documentation is attached directly to the ticket. This removed a lot of time spent searching for a particular ticket or specific page, making retrospectives much more streamlined. It also helped inform future documentation creation, as those creators could easily see what tickets were tied to a specific page, or which pages were referenced to solve specific tickets.

Wrap

I’ve found Confluence to be a great tool to support Support teams. It provides a centralized place for teams to look up, and add to, information, and offers a lot of integrations with Jira. Like any system, however, it does require maintenance, so be sure to think through how you’ll keep everything fresh and updated!