Delay diagnosis
Five delay types require different fixes
| Delay | Evidence | First intervention |
|---|---|---|
| visibility | request arrives but is not noticed | dedicated route and tested notifications |
| ownership | several people see it but nobody accepts | named acceptance and backup |
| routing | request reaches the wrong team | page, topic or language mapping |
| availability | no responder is actually on duty | honest hours and offline promise |
| answer production | owner needs repeated research | approved snippets, knowledge and specialist escalation |
Teams-first improvement
Use the existing workspace without creating channel noise
WebChat documents requests posted to mapped Teams channels and replies returned from threads. This can put the question near specialists and reduce a second-inbox switch.
It does not automatically create ownership or an SLA. Use a dedicated channel or controlled routing, show acceptance, define a backup and monitor unaccepted requests. Test desktop, mobile and quiet-hours notification settings.
Two-week experiment
Change one bottleneck at a time
- 01
Establish baseline
Record first useful response, unaccepted requests and offline share by route.
- 02
Fix ownership
Add acceptance, backup and escalation before changing tools.
- 03
Fix knowledge
Create a small reviewed answer set for the most repeated questions.
- 04
Retest exceptions
Use an unknown question, unavailable owner and wrong route to verify recovery.
Do not optimise the average alone
Track service quality as well as speed
- median and 90th-percentile first useful response time
- share accepted within the internal target
- unanswered and incorrectly routed requests
- transfer count and repeat-contact rate
- answer correction and inappropriate AI-response rate