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Run a support retrospective after an incident: a blameless review

After an outage or serious bug, engineering reviews the cause. Support has its own review: what customers experienced, how fast they heard from you, and what to change. A short, blameless retrospective does this well.

Last reviewed

Hold it soon, keep it short

Meet within a week, while details are fresh, and keep it to thirty minutes. Invite the agents who handled the tickets and one person from engineering.

Build the timeline from tickets

List when the first ticket arrived, when you noticed, when you told customers, and when it was fixed. The ticket timestamps give a more honest view than memory.

Look at what customers saw

Read a sample of tickets. What did people try? What did they expect? Note any wording in your status messages that confused them.

Keep it blameless

Ask what made the slow step easy to take, not who took it. Write down gaps in tools, templates and handoffs rather than names.

Follow up with the customers

Send a short note to everyone affected once the fix is confirmed: what happened, what is fixed, and what you are changing. Customers remember the follow-up more than the incident.

Change something concrete

End with two or three actions, each with an owner and a date: update a canned reply, add a status page step, change routing for the next incident. Check them at the next weekly review.

Questions

Who should attend a support retrospective?

The agents who handled the incident tickets, the support lead and one person from engineering or product who knows the cause.

How is it different from the engineering post-mortem?

The engineering review covers the technical cause. The support review covers what customers saw, how they were told, and how your own process held up.

Do I need a retrospective for small incidents?

A five-minute note is enough for small ones. Hold the full session for outages, data issues or anything that produced a spike of tickets.

Written by Flatdesk, a help desk for small support teams at one flat price per agent. Try it free for 14 days, no card.