20 IT Ticketing Best Practices for Improved IT Support
Get the most out of your service desk and boost your ticketing management processes with these 20 IT ticketing best practices to implement in your organization.
1. Avoid unnecessary ticket creation
Learning when or when not to create tickets can significantly impact the volume of incoming issues. By creating a knowledge base for recurring issues, you can help users self-service. If records of the incident are required or someone in IT needs to perform the task – that’s an ideal time to make the ticket.
2. Acknowledge ticketer requests
IT ticketing best practices have shown that automated email acknowledgments of ticket creation, providing the ticket number, expected response time and a link where the user can view ticket status are essential for good customer experience. Failure to provide a ticket acknowledgment email is one of the most common causes of duplicate tickets being created. Ongoing notifications giving process updates help with customer experience too.
3. Provide agent and requestor views
An important IT ticketing best practice is to provide multiple views into your ticket data. There is often detailed technical information, troubleshooting notes and sensitive data like known issues and security flaws recorded on IT tickets. This data is not intended to be viewed by the requestor or anyone outside the support organization.
The ticket views that requestors see need to reflect highly curated, edited and formatted information that provides clarity and avoids creating additional confusion. IT ticketing best practices suggest that agent notes and communications with requestors be managed in separate fields.
4. Create contingencies when the Assigned Change Manager is unavailable
An alternative person (or persons) should exist in the event the Assigned Change Manager is unavailable. This can ensure urgent changes are made and your ticketing management process isn’t halted.
Essentially, avoid and adapt any process that ceases to function when key persons are no longer available to guarantee customer satisfaction regardless of any potential hurdles.
5. Prevent junk mail
Filtering junk mail can be a burden on your IT service desk’s time. It also increases the likelihood of important tickets being overlooked. Configure automated spam services for a quick and easy boost in efficiency and accuracy.
6. Create a ticketing template for the data you need
IT ticketing best practices show that creating an organized structure to your ticket can make issues easier to solve and data easier to analyze and collect. Data fields are most appropriate for ticket header data that is only typically captured once and for system generated data like timestamps. Diagnostic data, user interactions and troubleshooting notes found in the ticket body are best suited for free-form text fields.
7. Classifying tickets
Ticket classification is essential to ticketing management. Classification data helps to establish wait times or service level agreements (SLA) expectations, route tickets to the correct teams, and group tickets for analysis and reporting. Rule-based workflow automation utilizes ticket classification data as a key tool for improving the efficiency of support processes. To properly assist your support team and help prioritize tickets, they can be classified with the following:
- Type – Event, Alert, Incident, Request or Question
- Source – System, User or Agent generated
- Priority – Assigned system priority
- Criticality – Rating of time sensitivity, business impact and urgency.
8. Enable self-service
By using the data obtained, you can create a knowledge base or self-service portal to boost the efficiency of self-service solutions. This means users or customers can potentially solve their own issues, reducing incoming traffic of help desk tickets to your support team.
9. Streamline IT service request validation
Before IT support can begin on a service request, they need to validate it. This is to ensure the service request is reasonable and required. Having a streamlined validation system means support staff can begin resolving tickets sooner.
10. Monitor ticket response times
Track and set standard service level agreements to boost your IT help desk efficiency. Response Time SLA is the elapsed time from a ticket’s creation or assignment until it is accepted and active troubleshooting begins. Resolution Time SLA is the total elapsed time from ticket creation until resolution, indicating the issue has been fully addressed.
11. Assess additional ticket metrics
Speed of response and resolution aren’t the only metrics to focus on. IT ticketing best practices suggest the following metrics should be tracked:
- Recurrence/Re-open rate – to measure support quality
- Backlog count – an indicator of responsiveness and resource capacity issues
- Effort (active support time) – a simplified measure of ticket difficulty
- # of handoffs – effectiveness of support workflows and routing rules
- User satisfaction – a measure of communication effectiveness
- First call resolution – an indicator of agent skillset and data collection at ticket creation
12. Avoid long-winded emails
Email conversations can lengthen the resolution timeline and deny knowledge bases the data they require. Establishing a ticket template with room for additional notes or free-form text in addition to fields for the most important questions can mitigate this.
In general, you want to avoid as much back-and-forth as possible.
13. Manage ticket queues
When tickets are created or routed to a support team they are usually assigned to a queue. This backlog enables the team to prioritize issues in order of importance. IT ticket best practices suggest using the following seven key factors to prioritize tickets:
- Ticket age
- System or service priority
- Skills required for resolution
- Subject area (specialized knowledge or access requirements)
- Issue difficulty
- Working hours and availability of user (geographic location)
- Local language requirements
You may also consider SLA compliance, capacity optimization and support costs as additional criteria.
14. Escalate where necessary
It is unreasonable to expect agents to be able to resolve every issue within the target SLAs. Tickets sometimes need to be escalated. This usually happens in one of three scenarios:
- User requests escalation
- Agent identifies a lack of skills or access to resolve issue
- SLA targets are missed (auto escalation)
The agent should summarize the current status of the ticket being sure to note any observations, assumptions and missing information along with any diagnostic and/or remediation actions taken.
15. Treat escalation as a positive
Ticketing best practices suggest that escalations should be treated as a positive action when the agent identifies the need early and avoids wasting time on tickets they know they will be unable to resolve.
16. Arrange a tiered support setup
Creating an intelligent tiered support structure makes the assignment and escalation of tickets easy. This means lower-skilled IT support members or those without permissions aren’t given unsolvable issues. It can optimize time spent, reduce escalations and ensure critical issues are dealt with by those with the skills and time to do it.
17. Create a ticket management workflow
Creating a robust ticket management workflow for your service desk staff can streamline the process by creating a predictable set of basic steps to follow. However, you need to ensure you enforce this and that all agents are up to date on the process.
This can also help set expectations for users as your service staff can give them an idea of what to expect throughout the ticketing process.
18. Empower your help desk staff
Giving help desk staff access to the tools and knowledge they need is an essential part of ticket management. This means ensuring they receive enough information (and training) to resolve tickets and creating a knowledge base for them to access when referring to similar cases. Ticket management software systems can often be a central part of this process.
19. Connect tickets to other data
IT tickets are a central part of your IT support desk, but they become more valuable when they relate to other ITSM and partner data.
With effective data integration, your support agents will be able to access the supporting data related any connected objects and avoid having to re-enter them into the ticket itself. This both saves time and effort as well as provides more information to assist in resolving the user’s issue.
20. Avoid misrouting tickets
ITSM systems often play an important role in routing tickets between support teams. While workflow automation helps, ticket routing is ultimately handled by your support team. IT ticketing best practices suggest that the most effective way to avoid misrouting tickets is through agent education on the subject. There are three common routing scenarios all IT service desk members should know:
- Routing to internal support team – ticket management practices mean that tickets will often be routed internally – with tickets directed to specialist resources based on the request or permissions required.
- Routing to external support partners – some companies leverage 3rd party support vendors to resolve tickets. They may not use the same ticketing system as your help desk team.
- Follow-the-sun support – this entails understanding how tickets can be passed off or handled by teams in different geographies for 24/7 support and continued troubleshooting.
