Support Playbook — Tideline (SaaS Support Team)

Illustrative example. Tideline, its staff, and the figures below are fictional and shown only to demonstrate how a support playbook is filled in. Adapt the channels, priorities, and SLAs to your own team before relying on them.

Team / product: Tideline (team-scheduling SaaS) Owner of this playbook: Rosa Delgado, Support Lead Version: 1.3 Last reviewed: 20 May 2026

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1. Support scope and channels

• We support: all paid Tideline plans, plus billing questions from trial users.
• We do not support: custom integrations built by third parties (we direct those to the partner) and questions about a customer's own internal policies.
• Hours: Monday-Friday, 8am-8pm UK time.

Channel	Use it for	Staffed hours	Target first response
Help desk (email)	All issue types	Mon-Fri 8am-8pm	4 business hours
Live chat	Quick how-to questions	Mon-Fri 9am-5pm	2 minutes
Phone	Urgent, account-blocking issues	Mon-Fri 9am-5pm	Immediate

2. Priorities and SLAs

Priority	Definition	First-response target	Resolution target
Urgent (P1)	Product down or a team cannot log in	30 minutes	4 hours
High (P2)	A core feature is broken with a painful workaround	2 business hours	1 business day
Normal (P3)	Everyday question or minor bug	4 business hours	2 business days
Low (P4)	Cosmetic issue or feature request	1 business day	Logged, no fixed date

3. Triage steps

1. Read the whole ticket and any prior history before replying.
2. Assign a priority from the table above based on impact, not on how the message is worded.
3. Tag the issue (billing, login, scheduling, bug, how-to) so it routes and reports correctly.
4. Resolve it at Tier 1 if it matches a known answer; otherwise route it per section 5.
5. Send a first response within the SLA that names the issue and the next step.

4. Canned-response guidelines

Agents start from a saved reply, then personalise the greeting, confirm the specific account or error, and remove anything that does not apply before sending. Every reply ends with the fix or a clear next step.

Template name	When to use it	Owner
Login troubleshooting	Customer cannot sign in	Tier 1
Bug acknowledged	Confirmed defect, routed to engineering	Tier 2
Billing adjustment made	Refund or proration applied	Tier 1

5. Escalation matrix

Situation	Escalate to	How / how fast
Issue needs deep product knowledge	Tier 2 (Sam Pereira)	Reassign in help desk, same day
Confirmed bug needing a code change	Engineering on-call	Linked ticket, within 1 hour for P1/P2
Unhappy customer or at-risk renewal	Support Lead (Rosa Delgado)	Direct message, within 1 hour
Product outage	Incident owner + status page	Phone the on-call engineer immediately

6. Tools

Tool	Used for	Where to get access
Help desk	Tickets, chat, saved replies	Ask the Support Lead to add you
Knowledge base	Self-service help articles	Editor access from the Support Lead
Status page	Outage and incident updates	Publish rights for Tier 2 and above

7. Metrics

Metric	Target	Reviewed
First-response time	90% within SLA	Weekly
Resolution time (by priority)	85% within SLA	Weekly
CSAT	At or above 90% positive	Monthly
Backlog / open tickets	Under 40 open at end of day	Daily