Intelligent Swarming at Ping Identity

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Ping Identity reduces resolution time, increases Engineer capacity, and improves the employee experience by adopting Intelligent Swarming.

The Need for Change

Ping Identity, a company that prides itself on being customer-centric and values growth and continuous improvement, implemented the Practice of Collaboration but needed more, and was striving to improve the customer experience even further.

Traditionally, Ping Identity support worked in a tiered model. Tier 1 would be assigned cases in a round-robin style with minimal control over the caseload. The Tier 1 Engineers would work through cases until they were solved or faced a roadblock. The culture in the team was always to solve everything you can; there was a certain level of pride that came with solving cases. This was hard to balance when it came to customer impact and knowing when to escalate to Tier 2 and, subsequently, Tier 3. Therefore, the average time to close for cases included the time it took to escalate from Tier 1 to Tier 3.

Another difficulty the support team faced was deep analysis; data-driven analysis and decisions were not yet in place. Thus, key stakeholders were not aware there was a problem. That, combined with people's natural aversion to change, kept the team in a pattern that eventually began to cause more significant issues. Over time, employee experience began to decline, and engineers felt overworked. There was no time to do everything they needed and wanted to do, such as training and upskilling. The workload and employee experience weight started manifesting negatively in the key performance indicators used.

The Approach

In Q4 of 2021, Ketan Tailor joined Ping as the new VP of Support. He had a vision that included KCS and Intelligent Swarming. In Q1 2022, he hired a leader of Support Operations & Strategy to execute that vision. Ping Identity agreed to take Intelligent Swarming seriously, and leadership committed to getting it done. Though they knew they had a long way to go, their confidence in execution was high.

Some of the challenges faced were resources, optimizing operations, and making significant changes to knowledge-sharing practices. The Support Operations team was new and small, yet they had plenty of motivation. Engineers were also excited to hear about the effort; they felt drained and wanted something new to help them with their daily work.

As the team started their planning phase, they realized they would face challenges. They aimed to get a “good enough to get started” system in place by the end of Q2 2022. Such a quick implementation seemed impossible, but they took a dynamic maturity model approach to create a "good, better, and best" framework. This approach allowed them to take manageable bites as they approached the work. As part of the Q2 planning, they gathered a design team composed of one Business Analyst and a few eager engineers of varying tenures who volunteered to help. In these planning stages, it was also helpful for Tailor to work with Ping Identity’s CIO John Cannava to align goals and priorities.

The design team began outlining existing problems; these problems would soon become opportunities. The team began to break the analysis into chunks: 1) the main problems we can solve now, and 2) the key swarming principles we must have. The team came to two main conclusions: first, it was not always clear what cases were asking of them, thus making it harder and taking longer to solve, and second, collaboration was something they were able to do realistically quickly.

After three weeks of designing and validating ideas from the Intelligent Swarming Practices Guide, the team developed a framework they aimed to execute within three months. Starting with the Connect Practice, North America and EMEA teams cautiously approached a hybrid model: a rotating triage team to qualify cases and a core team to work the cases. Qualifying cases meant ensuring all the information needed to get it to the right engineer and solve it reasonably quickly were in the case details. Due to the smaller size of the APAC team, it was decided they would jump straight to owning the cases for which they were qualified. For the Collaboration Practice, their CRM vendor was starting a beta test for a swarming and instant messaging application; this was perfect timing for Ping Identity. For the Recognize Practice, the team decided to start with a manual approach to learn from before beginning any automation or intelligent integrations. After the requirements were written and new processes were ready to implement, the team began working with their Information System team to test and deploy the changes. By the end of the three months, Ping Identity Support was live with its first phase of Intelligent Swarming.

Results

In the first 10 weeks, Ping's average time to close dropped by 15%, the SLA adherence increased by 13%, the backlog reduced by 25%, the time to first response improved by 75%, and the time to resolution on the most complicated cases was reduced by 81%.

Initial results were very promising. Engineers almost immediately noticed a reduction in workload. They started having more time for training and could focus on items leadership wanted. Focusing on behaviors drove the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in the right direction. The overall reception of the Connect and Collaborate changes was positive. The flattening of Tiers and the newfound ability to get help whenever they needed it, without escalation, was well received, particularly the retention of a case to enable better knowledge transfer and upskilling.

The metrics, however, were the star indicator of success. In the first 10 weeks, their average time to close dropped by 15%, the SLA adherence increased by 13%, the backlog reduced by 25%, the time to first response improved by 75%, and the time to resolution on the most complicated cases was reduced by 81%.

The Ping Identity team wondered if these indicators of improvement were temporary. So, they did another health assessment at the end of the year. Six months later, the improvements continued.

Intelligent Swarming success at Ping six months in.

In addition to the above indicators, they also had positive sentiment and feedback from the employee survey.

28% of Engineers said they learned from watching others collaborate.
33% said they learned from swarming vs escalating cases.
33% said they felt more confident helping customers.
33% said they got help from a wider variety of people.

Some of the best feedback included comments:

“I feel less pressure to solve cases; I feel more confident that the case will be solved by us as a team.”
“I have learned WAY more stuff & things since implementing this model, which was one of the primary goals; thank you for this! This has been helpful in ways that were unexpected. I have been able to address more of my cases and understand concepts more thoroughly, which has improved my efficiency and case handling.”
“I can deflect people when I am swamped, and other people can help.”

Reflections and Learnings

The satisfaction of the triage team was something that Ping Identity was unable to measure. The triage team thought it would be simple work that would be a break from their normal day-to-day, but it was a high-stress, no-downtime rollercoaster of cases. In addition, the work became repetitive very quickly. With “validation” engineers no longer owning cases within their rotations, job satisfaction loss was a factor due to a lack of problem-solving. In some instances, engineers would start ignoring the process and keep cases instead of passing them along to the core team to pick up and own. The primary insight from this case study highlights the critical importance of promptly addressing negative experiences rather than resorting to the usual responses to changes, which tend to diminish over time.

Another lesson from this case study is the importance of not rushing the initial rollout if the necessary resources are unavailable. Though the Ping Identity team knew the organization needed frequent insight into the work being done, they could not communicate it as often as they had planned due to bandwidth issues. As a result, there were pockets of misunderstandings and misconceptions. Monique Cadena, Senior Director of Knowledge & Digital CX, says, “Our lack of delivering frequent and abundant communications was not what it should have been, and we know we could have delivered better under different circumstances.”

Ongoing Evolution

Ping Identity continued to modify the processes in the Connect Practice as the team continued adoption. Within the next six months, the North American and EMEA teams did away with the triage process and moved into a full “pick up and own it” model, which is being received extremely well. They are currently building requirements for AI use cases to mature the Connect and Recognize Practices as part of their Digital CX strategy. After all, Intelligent Swarming isn’t Intelligent Swarming without the Intelligent piece!

About Ping Identity

Ping delivers unforgettable user experiences and uncompromising security. We make crafting digital experiences simple for any type of user—partners, customers, employees, and beyond. We are anti-lock-in. That means integration with existing ecosystems, clouds, and on-prem technologies is simple. Out-of-the-box templates let businesses leverage our identity expertise to give their users frictionless experiences. Whether they're building a foundation of modern digital identity, or out-innovating their competitors with cutting-edge services like digital credentials, AI-driven fraud prevention and governance, Ping is the one-stop shop for game-changing digital identity.

About the Consortium for Service Innovation

The Consortium for Service Innovation is a non-profit alliance of organizations focused on innovation for the support industry. The Consortium and its members have developed the KCS methodology since 1992 and Intelligent Swarming since 2009, and are committed to developing innovative ways to deliver customer support.

Consortium for Service Innovation™ and the Consortium for Service Innovation logo are trademarks of Consortium for Service Innovation. Intelligent Swarming℠ and KCS® are registered service marks of the Consortium for Service Innovation.

All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners.