Hey all, in my company we’ve been having a lot of trouble with our first-line support team and I wanted to get some ideas how it works in other companies.

To give some context, I work in a Customer Team (L2-L3 Support) for a MSP, previously I belonged to the Internal Operations Team and they had a very negative view on the first-line team, with opinions like:

• we don’t need them
• they lack knowledge
• management can’t create a good first-line team because they don’t want to invest

But I didn’t interact a lot with them before, but now, I have to interact with them on a daily basis, and I see some things that have started to make me worried about the team:

• They ignore KB’s
• They say that they don’t have access to certain servers, or that they don’t find the correct credentials and just pass the ticket for us to solve
• They have people that lack knowledge in some basic support, I have had tickets passed on with notes like “I don’t know how to use Linux”

From my point of view and the team I belong now, we all think that management didn’t really verify the required knowledge for some members of that team, but they really have a few that are trying really hard to improve their skills.

We have started to try to help them, so that our job can also become easier:

• Improve the language in legacy KB’s
• Simplify the process in the monitoring platform with more directions
• Automating some processes so that the first-line can execute fixes without having the required knowledge on the backend
• Picking the best members of their team and promoting them to our team

That team also has some problems that I fully recognize:

• Shit pay
• Bad leadership, that team has had 6 different Team Leaders in a short time (I have been here for only 2 years)
• Lacking interview and requirements for the position

Sorry for the long text, would love to have some feedback from your sides, or is this normal in a lot of companies?