Discover How Critical a Ticketing System Is
Think about all the “moving parts” that make up a business: There are the people, computers and other equipment, services (gas, water, electricity), human resources needs, catering and vending, home workers, field engineers… I am sure you can think of loads more!
Many of these departments and functions will have service needs, whether it’s reporting things that have gone wrong (incidents) or requests for service (new hardware, training, etc.) plus simple things like password resets or a new mouse. Small IT support teams might deal with a handful of issues every day, while larger ones might process hundreds!
How can I stay organized and on top of things?
While smaller businesses might get away with sticking it all in a spreadsheet, ticketing systems have become the established way for companies of any significant size to handle their support ticket volume and manage the entire workload. By way of an example, consider this very non-IT dilemma:
What would you do first if you had a lot of clothes outside drying and it started to rain, but just before that you decided to find out whether you had enough paper to print out an interesting article on beekeeping in Tasmania for a friend?
Priorities! What’s the best way to proceed? Check for paper or grab the clothes off the line?
A good ticketing system will not only help you decide and manage priorities, but it will also keep you on target with deadlines, make sure everyone involved is informed of progress, and produce useful reports to track repeat incidents.
Why would I care about repeat incidents?
Identifying repeat incidents can help you! Imagine that your team is getting a lot of calls about how to do something in a new piece of software, and it’s always the same request (you know that because of your tickets report!). What could you do to stop dealing with the same request time after time after time?
To track and investigate the root cause of similar incidents, the latter are grouped under a Problem ticket, and the outcome of the problem investigation determines the next steps. In this case, it could be to write a knowledge article and post it on the support website. As a result of this little bit of education, calls on this issue go down, which not only makes everyone’s lives just a little less hectic but saves money too!
In summary, a ticketing system not only keeps you organized but also helps you and your team identify opportunities for financial and workload improvement.
Having sold the benefits of ticketing and ticketing standards, let’s take a peek under the hood and find out actually what a ticketing system is.
Discover What a Ticketing System Is
Probably by now, you are getting the idea that a ticketing system isn’t just a glorified expensive alternative for a spreadsheet! So, how can we summarize what they do? Here’s a start - a ticketing system:
Manages customer inquiries and issues so that you don’t forget about them!
Keeps the customer informed about progress, so they don’t have to keep chasing down reports.
Gathers useful data about solutions and the work done to reach them.
Helps track the time spent on tickets and can raise an alert if things are taking too long.
Enables all team members to see others’ work in case they need to get involved or take over.
Allows useful reports that help plan and identify service improvement opportunities.
Why is it called a ticketing system?
Back in the early days of modern computing, when someone had an operational issue, they would write a description on a paper ticket and pin it on a notice board. That way, the engineering team could see it and have a stand-up to discuss their workload and allocate the jobs in priority order to the right people.
That notice board has been computerized in what we know as a ticketing system, and the work items are often still called tickets!
Modern service desks often comprise many teams in different countries handling hundreds of tickets per day. Support groups can include software support engineers, hardware engineers, network specialists, and many more in medium to large organizations. There may also be third-party organizations that provide support and services. Moreover, all tickets are considered to come from customers, whether internal or external to the business.
It’s easy to appreciate that managing the service needs of medium to large businesses in an effective manner is no longer possible with a simple notice board!
Over time, many best practices for IT support, also known as IT service management (ITSM), have been defined. The most common collection of these best practices is the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®).
Many ITSM tools have adopted ITIL terminology, or their workflows follow ITIL-suggested patterns, so they define themselves as ITIL aligned or even ITIL compatible. Throughout this course, we will use ITIL terms as you’ll encounter them frequently in the IT support world.
You may also come across the term IT asset management (ITAM). Some ITSM tools include ITAM functionality, which means they can maintain an inventory of hardware, software, and licenses, to help manage these and also associate support tickets with assets. For example, it becomes easier to track the number of corporate laptops issued through request tickets or generate reports of networking equipment generating the most support tickets, perhaps indicating a reliability issue.
Discover How Tickets Are Part of Your Everyday Life
When your job is “being a valued member of a support team,” you might feel overwhelmed and stressed by the sheer volume of tickets coming your way! But don’t worry, let’s try to make things easier for you!
In simple terms, you need to process the inbound workload to get it triaged (assessed) and assign a priority. Then the ticketing system can help you decide what to handle next.
Some organizations implement single point of contact (SPoC) service desks, through which absolutely all customer issues are channeled. For an internal desk, this might mean that the front-line (also known as first-line level 1 (L1) or tier 1) team/s takes a wide variety of calls, ranging from HR and facilities issues to requests for stationery and reports of server outages. Although the scope of these calls is very large, the first steps are identical:
The issue is received.
A ticket is created.
The ticket is triaged.
Ticket priority is confirmed.
The ticket is assigned to the team considered best able to resolve it.
The role of the team entering the tickets into the system (the first-line, or Level 1 (L1), team) might stop there. They might resolve simple issues themselves; things such as password resets, sending out documents or recording employee sick leave, etc., or they might assign the tickets to other departments.
Team support levels are categorized as follows:
L0: Automated/self-help/wiki pages and knowledge bases.
L1: The front line service desk handling & triaging tickets, and perhaps dealing with simple issues.
L2: People with specific technical expertise who may be engaged to assist with a ticket.
L3: In-house subject matter experts (SMEs: programmers, hardware designers, solution architects, etc.).
L4: Third-party organizations.
Not all organizations will use this model. For example, the L2/L3 functions might be combined, or third-party organizations (L4) may not be used.
Can you imagine how much harder it was with paper tickets and notice boards? Using a ticketing system in the workplace will definitely make your daily life easier, managing workload and tickets consistently.
Implementing Consistency
The diagram below describes the typical process that’s applied consistently to all inbound support or service issues. The words in bold indicate how the ticket status changes during its journey:
Let’s Recap!
Most businesses need a technical support team and a way to organize their workload; the tool is often called a ticketing system.
A ticketing system helps by managing priorities, keeping you on target, making sure the relevant parties are informed of progress and producing reports to track incidents.
The ITIL framework describes best practice ways to manage and deliver technical support services.
Ticketing systems can organize support activities and report on them too.
A ticketing system will make your daily life easier!
Now that you know the basics of a ticketing system and how critical it is, let’s have a look at the different ticketing tools on the market.
