Improve Incident Resolution with Freshservice Team Huddle
Enterprise collaboration is gaining traction that encourages internal peer interaction and information sharing. IT Service Management (ITSM) focuses on agent-to-agent collaboration for improved efficiency and better ticket handling. IT has multiple sub-functions that include experts in their respective domains. For example, there is the network group, security group, application support etc. Though there are different group classifications, they interact closely with each other and with other departments, using a collaboration tool, to ensure seamless IT & infrastructure operations. Therefore, collaboration among these functions is crucial for various good reasons, as is the presence of a collaboration tool.
86% of polled executives and employees blame a lack of collaboration or bad communication for team problems and failures.
Collaboration is a cultural mindset. Therefore, it is a challenge to make IT people move out of their zone and collaborate with others. Therefore, a structured cultural transformation backed up with efficient technology and tools enable collaboration. Working together as one team is something we as an organization aspire for. On a similar note, Swarming is a collaboration technique and an industry best practice that insists on teamwork and solving issue as a team. It is based on three basic principles,
- Collaboration among functions
- Flat structure
- No escalations
Freshservice is aimed at delivering a great agent experience besides intuitive end-user experience. Freshservice introduced a new feature a little while ago called Team Huddle which aims function as a collaboration tool among service desk agents. It provides full context for agents within a particular ticket. The importance of an online collaboration tool is often ignored but it can solve some of the major problems that exist today in any team. This blog lists the top 4 challenges that exist today in Incident Management and Service Request Management and suggests how this collaboration functionality, Team Huddle, can come to your rescue.
Are your teams geographically distributed?
When IT functions are dispersed, communication is more important than ever. For example, when a server incident is reported, the network team and IT operations teams work together to fix this. When these teams are distributed, communicating the overall context becomes tough. Though the primary owner of the ticket is the server team, they interact closely with the IT operations team to check whether systems are up and running. Team Huddle solves this problem of connecting these two teams seamlessly without losing any context on the issue. Team Huddle lets agents connect using a simple chat interface within the ticket. An agent can initiate a chat with another agent easily, right inside the ticket. Availability status is also easily visible, whether they are online or not.
Difficult to reach out to Subject Matter Experts?
Recurring incidents require Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in order to fix the issue permanently. RCA is done by a group of Problem experts who interact with the Incident team to provide either a workaround or a permanent fix. Domain expertise is crucial for IT teams to resolve issues faster. Agents from Incident and Service request teams interact with other experts such as Change agents, Problem agents or with other departments such as HR, Finance et al. In this collaboration model, a team including ticket owner, domain experts come together to solve the issue. SMEs need not be accountable to resolve the ticket but their assistance is helpful for the agents to swiftly fix users’ issues. Freshservice Team Huddle lets you connect to these SMEs seamlessly with a default notification mechanism. Whenever a chat is initiated for a particular person, in-app & email notifications are triggered. It lets you attach relevant documents within the chat interface. This facilitates faster and clear communication resulting in faster resolution.
Hurt by the Silo effect?
Centralized Knowledge Management is a challenge for many organizations. Due to Shadow IT and other cultural factors, knowledge silos do exist despite the effort to unify remote teams through collaboration tools. Knowledge-base articles may not be exhaustive sometimes (which AI-backed technologies are trying to fix) and agents will require support from peers. Knowledge distribution issues result in siloed information. Unifying Knowledge creation and distribution processes will address this problem. Knowledge silos result in inefficiency. Therefore, collaboration among agents using Team Huddle solves the problem of silos and prevents reinventing the wheel. Agents will be able to highlight a certain section of the ticket within the chat interface.
39% of employees within a surveyed group believe that there isn’t enough collaboration between people in their organization
Context Switching?
When an agent moves out of the service desk for any collaboration or help, context is lost. When all the relevant conversations happen within a particular ticket, it is easier for everyone to understand and follow up. Team Huddle tracks all the conversations within the ticket in one place. Discussions that happen between the agents are stored within the ticket. This provides full-fledged context for anyone working on the ticket. It is important that all related conversations are tracked for better ticket resolution. Agents switch between multiple tools in order to resolve a ticket. Team Huddle addresses this problem when all agents are onboard within a single service desk instance.
Benefits of Team Huddle
- Better collaboration among agents
- Faster resolution
- Improved peer-to-peer interaction and knowledge sharing
- Easy accessibility to remote team members
- Agility in business, enabled by IT
You can click here to check out use cases for team huddle.
The way we work is changing rapidly. The Tiered support model is evolving into a new collaborative model, like Swarming. Therefore, you should ensure that your service desk solution supports this model of working. Above all, bringing the cultural and behavioral changes among agents to collaborate is a great shift towards collaborative ITSM. Companies are realizing great benefits by investing in ChatOps such as Team Huddle and combining this into their Incident Management workflows. If you would like to try our collaboration platform, click here.
Cover Image by Sharmila
