Building Dedicated L2 Support Services for a European Retailer

Project snapshot

Before this engagement, product teams inside the client’s Customer Experience domain were responsible for 100% of day-to-day support across 12 applications, including a content management system, an article broker, a product detail page service, and a coupons service, alongside a related SRT service. Support was handled as an ad-hoc task layered on top of regular development work rather than as a structured service.

Intellias built dedicated L2 support services to take that work off developers’ hands: a standalone team running standardized, ITIL-aligned processes with 24/7 coverage. It was the first project in the relationship with this client, and its success became the basis for extending the collaboration into other departments.

Business challenge

With no dedicated L2 application support infrastructure, every incident, service request, and production issue landed on the same people responsible for shipping new features. There was no formal incident, service request, or problem management process, no 24/7 on-call coverage for critical issues, and no consistent documentation — troubleshooting knowledge stayed siloed within individual developers rather than being captured anywhere reusable.

The consequences showed up directly in delivery output. Developers and product owners couldn’t stay focused on core feature work because support interruptions kept pulling them away. Response and resolution times for critical issues weren’t stabilized, so performance was inconsistent from one incident to the next. And without regular KPIs or service-level reporting, stakeholders had no real visibility into how the applications were actually performing in production.

Solution

Intellias set up L2 tech support services as their own function rather than a side responsibility for developers. The team implemented ITIL-aligned processes covering incident, service request, and problem management, replacing the ad-hoc handling that came before.

Alongside the process work, the team built a knowledge base of more than 130 runbooks, so operational knowledge lives with the client rather than staying locked inside individual engineers’ heads. The team also established 24/7 on-call coverage, something none of the 12 applications had before.

The scope of the initiative wasn’t fixed at the outset — some priorities came directly from the client; others were identified by the Intellias team as they worked inside the applications day to day. That combination shaped both the process design and the objectives the team was holding to.

Business outcomes

• Developer involvement in support dropped from 100% to 3% per month. This was the core objective set for the team, and it’s already been achieved.
• Product owners got their time back too. Development and product ownership sit with separate teams on the client side, and both had been heavily pulled into production support. Freeing up product owners’ time was as significant an outcome as freeing up developers’, since both teams can now stay focused on driving the roadmap forward instead of firefighting.
• 24/7 coverage with a 15-minute average response time. Critical issues now get a consistent, fast response around the clock, something the client didn’t have in place before.
• 100% positive user feedback, alongside internal client feedback that the results have exceeded expectations.
• The L2 IT support function is scaling. What started as coverage for one department has already expanded to a second, and every new product the client delivers is planned to be handed over to this same support function going forward.
• It became the foundation for further collaboration. As the first project in the relationship, its results built the trust that led directly to additional engagements with the client.