# Support-to-engineering handoff SOP

Version: 1.0

Owners: Support operations lead and engineering intake owner

Purpose: Convert a qualified customer problem into acknowledged, reproducible engineering work while support retains customer ownership.

## Trigger and prerequisites

Trigger: a support agent determines that known support, policy, account and billing paths do not resolve the issue. Security, privacy, safety and major incidents use their dedicated procedures.

Required fields: observed behavior, expected behavior, environment/version, UTC timeline, frequency, reproduction attempt, impact and scope, workaround, sanitized evidence, severity inputs, customer-facing owner and deadline.

## Procedure

1. Confirm engineering is the correct destination and select the escalation type.
2. Validate required fields and source links; return incomplete packets with field-level feedback.
3. Scan attachments and remove credentials, payment data and unnecessary personal data.
4. Search internal work by product area, error ID and normalized symptom.
5. Require a human to confirm uncertain duplicate matches.
6. Draft a source-cited summary; preserve unknowns and failed reproduction attempts.
7. The support owner verifies severity, privacy boundary and summary.
8. Create or link engineering work using `support_ticket_id:escalation_version` as the business key.
9. Store reciprocal links and the field-mapping snapshot.
10. Start the acknowledgement timer. Engineering accepts, rejects with reason or requests specific evidence.
11. Support keeps the customer clock and communication cadence.
12. Synchronize curated status events, not raw internal discussion.
13. On fix-ready, run the defined verification against the original observed/expected condition.
14. Close only after verification and an approved customer-safe update.

## Exceptions

- Unsafe evidence: quarantine and route to security.
- No acknowledgement: escalate by severity to the duty owner.
- Ambiguous create result: reconcile both systems before retrying.
- Duplicate discovered later: relink and preserve both references.
- Verification fails: return evidence to engineering; do not close.

## Measures

Packet return rate, duplicate-confirmation precision, acknowledgement time, stale ownership, time to first customer update, verification failure, reopen rate and privacy exceptions.

## Revision log

- 2026-08-03: Initial public template.