Tiered support vs swarming – which will suit you?

With DevOps gaining momentum among leading organizations, there’s been a change in the way IT teams have worked. Of late, swarming – a new form of IT support has been in the spotlight. Experts have taken the side of this new swarming model and backed it to be ideal for IT orgs of any scale.

What we aim to discuss in this blog is to compare and contrast between these two approaches on the following aspects,

• Swiftness in solving support tickets

• Ease of collaboration

• Ease of implementation and adoption

Before we delve into the comparison, it’s important that we know how the two models work.

Tiered support model for customer support:

The three-tiered support model gained prominence with the growth of ITIL. ITIL defines organizing your IT support into a three-tiered-structure—the service desk (a single point of contact for end users), technical teams (server and database teams), and the applications & IT ops teams. At any given point, these teams work together to,

• Minimize outage

• Keep the downtime to a minimum and

• Ensure every stakeholder is satisfied

Now, let’s look at the tiered support model with examples.

Tier-1 or L1 support:

Tier-1 or Level-1 support is your frontline defense, handling basic issues like password resets, software installation guidance, or simple troubleshooting. For example, when a user reports that they cannot access their email. Tier-1 support checks for common issues like incorrect login credentials or network problems. Some IT teams also use knowledge bases to encourage self-service, and AI agents and chatbots to deflect repetitive, low-priority queries. This helps boost support staff productivity. Tier-1 support is usually the service desk or the traditional IT support team, typically staffed with generalists, and resolves most tickets and cuts down wait times.

Tier-2 or L2 support:

If tier-1 support cannot resolve the issue, it escalates to a higher tier or L2 support, where technicians with deeper technical knowledge address more complex problems across different levels. Imagine a software application repeatedly crashing. Tier-2 support investigates this by examining logs, updating drivers, or reconfiguring settings. Tickets that require technical/domain expertise are usually passed on to tier-2 or L2 support (the application management team). To improve decision-making and productivity, L2 customer support teams use workflows and custom rules to automate the incoming resolution process for incoming tickets and requests. The efficiency of these workflows can be tracked by key metrics like average resolution time, first response time, ticket assign time, average handling time, etc.

Tier-3 or L3 support:

Tier-3 or L3 support handles the most critical and complex issues, often involving specialized problem solving knowledge or development teams. When a critical system integration fails, tier-3 support diagnoses the root cause, potentially involving code changes or in-depth system analysis. Tier-3 or L3 support is usually the IT ops and developer teams.

As you would have noticed (or rather experienced), the three-tier model works on the basis of ticket escalation and is strictly hierarchical.

Imagine this,

An IT team of 20 agents are trying to run a javascript(JS) to reaffirm security on laptops and handhelds for 1500 employees. Ideally, the IT folks would want the end users to change it by themselves, using the instructions sent over email.

But, boom – there are 300 tickets the next morning! People are at your service desk with  one issue after the other regarding the JS. In scenarios like these, you would ideally want the whole IT team to jump in, help out the employees and not wait for hierarchical approach. But the three-tier model puts all the burden on only a small number of service desk agents.

Enter swarming…

Swarming:

If there was a diametrically opposite model to tiered IT support, it would be swarming.

It revolves around three simple basics,

• Collaboration between support agents

• Flat hierarchy

• No escalations

Can an unstructured approach like swarming be all that rosy? Some of our customers who have talked about their IT teams’ resistance to change, steep learning cycles, the non-availability of set models to replicate, and many other reasons, have started implementing swarming. Also, swarming has found greater success in organizations adopting DevOps than those that haven’t.

That said, let’s see how they stack up against each other on various aspects that are important in solving day-to-day challenges.

Swiftness in solving tickets

The swarming method of IT support works on the “pick-up-collaborate-solve-repeat” model. Typically, anyone and everyone in the technical support team is expected to “swarm” on a user’s problem and solve it. 

While this model is seemingly nimble, the catch is that easily solvable tickets will reach overqualified agents.

Swarming experts like Jon Hall argue that the traditional three-tiered IT support doesn’t protect subject matter experts from high-volume low-difficult cases on daily basis. 

In a nutshell, what you wish to trade off for solving tickets ‘quickly’ will determine your approach. If your organization plans to adopt DevOps, the swarming model will ensure your key members and subject matter experts are innovating and not solving high-escalation tickets. This should nullify the concern of talent misuse often associated with the model.

Ease of collaboration:

Collaboration is the very basis on which the swarming model is built. The entire IT team swings into action as soon as an issue is reported by an end user. Depending on the size of your IT team, the number of swarms you might have may vary.

On the other hand, collaboration in the three-tiered model can be straightforward only when:

• A large number of issues coming to your service desk software are straightforward

• Your support team is very small (say < 20 members)

• The tickets and issues you face are repetitive in nature

For companies of smaller sizes, swarming model might seem like a no-brainer. Swarming is compatible with most IT organizations and the learning curve for IT support staff is almost linear.

So when it comes to collaboration, swarming has a slight edge because of its underlying principles of flatter approach to solving IT support. However, if your team size is small, and your service desk solves similar kind of tasks, three-tier support still holds good.

Ease of implementation and adoption:

As outlined from the start, the three-tiered model of IT support has been here forever. IT organisations have a template to follow as the approach has been implemented a million times with a fair amount of success. In addition to this, training material, courses etc., to set your IT team up for success are available at zero cost when you’re implementing the three-tiered model.

On the flipside, swarming model of IT support is relatively new and followed by very few organisations like Cisco and is seeing success. There’s not a lot of stories out there that you can readily duplicate for your IT support. Also the adoption of the swarming model depends on lot of factors like maturity of your team, their openness to change, organization culture, your development methodologies among others.

To sum it up, we have put together this really cool matrix on advantages and disadvantages of both these approaches. If you think we have missed out any factor in favor of/against these models, you know where the comments section is 😀 

After comparing these factors, which one do you think is better? Well, it really depends on what YOU need. We’ve seen a lot of companies seeing success with both these approaches.