Event-driven architecture facilitates systems to reply to real-life events, such as when the user’s profile is updated. This post illustrates building reactive event-driven applications that handle data loss by combining Spring WebFlux, Apache Kafka, and Dead Letter Queue. When used together, these provide the framework for creating fault-tolerant, resilient, and high-performance systems that are important for large applications that need …
Read More »A Developer’s Guide to Modern Queue Patterns
In today’s distributed systems, queues serve as the backbone of reliable, scalable architectures. They’re not just simple data structures — they’re powerful tools that help manage system load, ensure reliability, and maintain data consistency across complex distributed applications. This comprehensive guide explores the most important queue patterns that solve real-world problems in modern software architecture. The Basics: What’s a Queue? …
Read More »How We Triage Our Support Queue
Our customer service team at Help Scout is full of smart and experienced people. It’s not by accident — as a remote-first company spread out all over the globe, hiring folks who are knowledgeable and capable is a deliberate strategy. Even so, there is no end to the edge cases, odd bugs, and esoteric details in SaaS support. These are …
Read More »Avoiding Cherry-Picking in the Support Queue
In Ask Help Scout, long-time customer service professional Mat “Patto” Patterson answers readers’ most challenging customer support delivery, leadership, and career questions. Dear Patto, Our support team is going to grow quite quickly, and we want to minimize the chance of people cherry-picking tickets. The obvious answer is assigning out every incoming ticket automatically, but I would rather avoid that …
Read More »14 Support Queue Management Tips
For customer service teams, the support queue shapes their work lives, shifting from a trickle of questions to a raging torrent of customer confusion throughout the various seasons of a business. Understanding and managing the power of the queue is critical to a sustainable customer service organization. The art of the support queue You might well ask, “Why do we …
Read More »Tap Into Revenue in the Queue With Light Users
Many of us are looking for new ways to stretch our resources and get the most impact with the tools we already have. And while we find ways to be savvy with current investments, we’re also putting our heads together to uncover new ways to support our revenue-driving teams in reaching their goals. How can you help sales, account management, …
Read More »Finding Joy in the Feedback Loop — Through Improv and in the Queue
Supporting folks as they engage in all the things that fill them up outside of work is a priority at Help Scout. “Exploring a hobby or side project is something we encourage everyone to do,” said Nick Francis, Help Scout’s co-founder and CEO. “It’s certainly something that’s important to me. I’ve found that those pursuits are a great way to …
Read More »Support Team Mailbag: Managing the Queue
Ever wonder what the customer support queue for a customer support platform might look like? Welcome to the Support Team Mailbag, a blog series where you can learn what’s on our customers’ minds and get the inside scoop on how we provide support. Today’s question: Do you have any examples of how different support teams manage their queues and structure …
Read More »Groundhog Day in the Queue
How long did Phil Connors spend reliving the same Groundhog Day? It depends who you ask, but certainly long enough for him to map out in detail the daily motions of the Punxsutawney residents. At first the repetition is baffling, then exciting, then existentially dreadful, before he is ultimately able to escape through the learning of a moral lesson (and …
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