Best practices for managing technical support tickets

What is an IT ticket or a technical support ticket, and why is it important?

'Support ticket' is the term generally used to describe the recording of a task carried out (or which must be carried out) by your IT support system in   order to exploit the technological environment of your company, to repair the problems and resolve customer requests. Tickets can represent a large number of different tasks or activities depending on the nature of your IT environment and the objectives of your support team. Technical support tickets can also be called “service requests”, “technical support tickets” or “support cases” but most organizations and users are familiar with the term “support ticket”, which we will use in this guide.

Support tickets are important to your business as they allow you to keep track of each support transaction to keep your IT environment in working order, thus adding value to your business. Tickets are usually entered into an IT service management system (ITSM) where they are stored, managed and updated when the problem or activity is resolved. Helpdesks or IT support centers use IT tickets as a way to capture and record user interactions. Operational teams use ticketing systems to track technical issues that need to be addressed. IT management uses ticket data to know the workload of the teams,

Efficient management of support tickets plays a vital role in ensuring that your business receives a good return on its IT investments. It is an important concept at the heart of your IT operations. Leveraging best practices for handling support ticketing is a great way to help IT manage costs, provide better systems and services to users, and reduce the impact of events that can disrupt business. business.
 

Support tickets and ITIL

The ITIL  (formerly known as an IT infrastructure library) represents the set of industry best practices and collective standards for how IT service management should be performed. It is important to note that ITIL does not handle technical support tickets but rather incidents and IT service requests, which are other types of support tickets. Although ITIL uses a different terminology, it contains good practices in terms of managing tickets for the operation of services, which should be read and known.

Collect data for the creation of the IT ticket

The data you collect and save when creating an IT ticket is essential to the efficiency of your customer service. It is necessary to collect enough data to accurately represent the underlying problem, classify it and route it to the right resource, but be careful not to collect unnecessary data: it slows down the support process and represents a waste of time and resources. The challenge faced by many IT organizations is not knowing what data they will need; either they collect too much information or they have to come back to the user later to collect more. Businesses also tend to collect data that

The good practices for managing technical assistance tickets show that it is necessary to manage all of these elements in a consistent manner in the form of “tickets”, but also to classify them according to the type of problem they represent. For example, this involves collecting the user ID or email address and using it to find contact information and location. You can also enter the tag of an asset or the identifier of a device and search for information on configuration and version, or enter the name of the affected system or service to search for monitoring data and recordings. a change. To effectively implement this approach,

The two additional pieces of information to collect for user initiated tickets and those registered by support agents are: “What is the impact of this problem? and “how can we reproduce this problem?” The answers to these two questions can usually only be provided by the end user, and are essential for assessing the severity of the ticket and assigning the appropriate priority to it.

The recent trend in customer service is to see users opening tickets using mobile devices. These devices provide an opportunity to collect additional pieces of information that may prove useful in the support process. First, geolocation - most mobile devices have their GPS enabled and are able to share location data with installed apps. Location data can help support personnel better diagnose network connectivity and latency issues that may appear to the user to be system or service issues. Mobile devices are also usually equipped with cameras and can capture screen images and videos.

Provide a first response to the client

You may not be able to process a ticket immediately. But users, on the other hand, expect to receive an immediate response. Good IT ticket management practices show that an automated response that confirms the correct creation of the ticket is necessary. It provides the ticket number, expected response time and a link through which the user can view the status of their request. This is part of the essential communications that must be sent to the user as soon as the ticket has been received. One of the primary causes of duplicate tickets is the inability to provide a ticket receipt by email.

Best practices in terms of ticket content

The content of a technical support ticket is generally presented according to a basic structure with header data and body text. The ticket header provides information about the requester, displays a brief description of the problem reported, as well as classification data for affected systems, and finally the date and time used to calculate SLAs. The data in the header is used to manage the ticket throughout its life cycle. The data in the body of the ticket, on the other hand, is used to perform searches and resolve the ticket. The body of the ticket usually contains data such as the steps to reproduce, a message from the user, troubleshooting notes, and the actions taken to resolve the ticket.

Individual vs. data fields free notes

A common problem encountered by companies when designing their IT ticket management systems is to determine the data to be collected in dedicated fields on tickets versus the data to be entered in free text fields (notes). Dedicated fields for data are easy to use for analysis, reporting and workflow automation rules, but they take longer to fill out than forms.

Good practices in terms of handling support tickets indicate that dedicated forms are more suitable for ticket header data which is generally entered only once (no frequent updates) and for system generated data such as date and time. Since the data in the ticket header is the most commonly used for queue prioritization, routing rules and reporting, having a dedicated form for this data facilitates these tasks. The diagnostic data, user interactions, and troubleshooting notes found in the body of the ticket are more suited to free text fields that allow copying and pasting large blocks of information.

Agent and Applicant Views

An important good practice for the management of IT support tickets is to offer different ways to consult the data of the ticket in question. In the notes that the agent saves on technical support tickets, there are often detailed technical information, troubleshooting notes, and information that can be kept confidential, such as known issues and security concerns. This data is not intended for the requester or anyone else outside of customer support. The views of the ticket offered to the requester should reflect carefully edited and formatted information, which is clear and avoids creating further confusion. Best practices for managing support tickets suggest managing notes from the

Classification of tickets

The classification of tickets is an important element of modern ticket management systems. Data classification is generally used to establish expectations in terms of SLA, to route tickets to the right support teams and to group tickets for analysis and reporting purposes. Rule-based workflow automation uses data classification as a key tool to improve the efficiency of support processes. Technical support tickets should include 4 key elements of data classification:

• Type  - Event, Alert, Incident, Request or Question
• Source  - System, user or agent generated
• Priority  - Priority assigned by the system, business process or ticket activity
• Severity  - Assessment of the urgency, the degree of impact on the business and the urgency of the problem.

Tickets must be filed in an accurate and consistent manner in order to receive the right level of attention from your support team, and to ensure that the issues most important to the business are dealt with first.

Ticket management and SLA indicators

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a measurement tool for assessing the performance of ticket management by comparing it to a set of predefined criteria. It is above all a tool allowing you to define the way in which your tickets are processed by your support team and your external partners. The SLA measurement areas and defined performance objectives determine whether teams and individuals manage their workload. Technical assistance tickets are generally evaluated according to 2 SLAs.

• Response Time SLA  - The time elapsed since the creation and / or allocation of a ticket to a queue until it is accepted by an individual and active resolution begins.
• Resolution Time SLA  - The total time from the creation of the ticket to the time it is placed in resolved status, which indicates that the problem has been addressed.

These two SLAs focus on speed of response and ticket resolution, encouraging agents to behave in ways that close tickets quickly. IT support can be costly, and while these SLAs can encourage spending control, businesses must ensure that their use does not lead to unwanted behavior or quality issues. Good support ticket management best practices indicate that SLAs for support quality and customer satisfaction should also be included to encourage agents to focus on resolving underlying issues that impact the user rather than on closing the support ticket.

In addition to SLA indicators, IT ticket management best practices recommend monitoring the following indicators to help assess the overall performance of support operations and to target areas for improvement.

• Recurrence / Reopening Rate  - a measure of the quality of support
• Pending number  - an indicator of the speed of response as well as capacity issues in terms of resources
• Effort (duration of active support)  - a simplified measure of the difficulty of the ticket
• # of transfers  - efficiency of workflows and support routing rules
• User satisfaction  - a measure of communication efficiency
• First call resolution  - an indicator of the agent's skills and data collection when creating the ticket

Climbing

Technical support tickets can be complex, so agents cannot be expected to resolve any issues that arise by following the SLA to the letter. Sometimes tickets need to be transferred to another person, either internally (to get help from another person on the team) or by sending the ticket to another group (internal or external) who is more qualified to deal with the problem. There are 3 key scenarios that trigger the escalation of IT tickets:

• User requests escalation of ticket
• Officer understands that he does not have the skills, access or knowledge to solve the problem
• SLA targets are missed (automatic escalation)

Ticket escalations should be treated as transfers (either internal or external) and should therefore follow a similar process. The agent must summarize the current status of the ticket, taking care to note all the observations, assumptions and missing information as well as all the actions taken with a view to the diagnosis and / or repair. This information is essential to allow the person receiving the ticket to quickly assess the situation and continue to provide support. Good ticket management practices indicate that escalations should be seen as a positive action when officers identify the need early enough and avoid spending time on tickets they know they cannot resolve.

Associate support tickets with other data

Support tickets are a central part of your technical support operations, and become even more valuable when linked to other ITSM and partner data. At a minimum, you should be able to associate your support tickets with the following data:

 

Thanks to effective data integration, your customer service agents are able to access data relating to each of these associated objects and do not have to enter them again in the ticket. This saves time while providing additional information that will help solve the user's problem.