Ranjeet Minampally is Stack Moxie’s Senior Director of Product Engineering with an IT background. He has been a career-long advocate of servant leadership and strategic product roadmapping, and now supports Stack Moxie in finding new ways to deliver solutions in the world of marketing operations.
Dealing with the errors and issues that inevitably come up in the world of marketing technology can seem daunting, but maintaining good practices from an IT perspective means smoother sailing for your MOPs team, the rest of your organization, and your customers as you find solutions. Too often, marketing operations teams exclude themselves from company-wide platforms that can be common among departments. Instead, many companies opt for two separated systems that make it difficult to stay on the same page when it comes to reporting and fixing errors.
The Importance of a Unified System
As someone who has a good understanding of both the MOPs and the IT side of this coin, I can’t understate the importance of using a company-wide tool to track issues. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of error reporting, you know how quickly notifications about the same issue, coming from different teams and individuals, stack up when something goes wrong. As each person discovers the problem, they reach out to make sure it’s caught as soon as possible and get it fixed. The problem is, if you multiply the number of error notifications, big and small, that occur in any given week by the number of people from your organization that will encounter and report them directly to you, the time spent addressing each message eats up valuable time that could be put towards making necessary fixes.
From the perspective of the employee doing the reporting, it can be frustrating to have no visibility into an error and its status. If you’re waiting on the solution to move forward with your own work but you’re getting no response from the team responsible for it (who are likely hard at work trying to get things back on track), it’s difficult to plan your own capacity and make promises to the people relying on you.
Suffice to say, while each team can certainly have the freedom to create its own internal processes to deal with things, one company-wide bug tracking system is a must. You’re helping yourself, your team, and the rest of the organization and making everyone’s time more impactful.
Improving Company Dynamics and Communication
Another added advantage to marrying MOPs into the rest of the company with this common platform: You’re giving extra visibility to the overall IT team about what MOPs is doing and how you can join forces to be even more productive. Marketing operations can seem confusing to outsiders, and the many MOPs-specific tools that the team uses mean it’s difficult for other departments to have a clear idea of what’s going on. By having this shared error reporting platform, MOPs becomes a more influential part of the general organization when it comes to making decisions and planning roadmaps.
This shift in dynamics goes a long way in improving communication between departments, which only stands to strengthen the trust each team has in the others. It’s a great feeling for marketing operations individuals as well, whose work often gets overlooked due to a lack of awareness or understanding from other sections of the organization. The better you bridge the gap, the greater potential there is for success as a company.
Best Practices for Integrating Into a Common System
As you begin the journey of integrating a company-wide system into existing tools and platforms, there are some best practices that are helpful to keep in mind.
- Make knowledge base articles accessible to users before they log tickets. This helps prevent the unnecessary logging of tickets, which reduces ticket resolution time.
- Implement real-time ticket reporting. When users have visibility into this, it surfaces ways to improve KPIs.
- Prioritize a great customer experience that gives users access to current tickets. Users will feel more involved in the process, and viewing current tickets and the predicted time of resolution will make it easier for them to plan their own work.
- Make the system part of your existing process. By integrating the platform into your existing tools, users will better be able to relate to the new procedure and the experience will feel like an omni-channel service.
