Prioritizing And Scheduling Tickets

One of the keys to successful help desk ticket management is proper prioritizing of requests and scheduling times for follow up.

Unfortunately, many variables can prevent the ticket requests from being tagged and scheduled properly.

It is a misconception to believe that every ticket automatically gets prioritized by time created alone.

Because higher importance tickets get tagged as high, medium or low priority.

With low priority tickets categorized as normal default tickets and color coded green for clarification.

Likewise, medium and high priority tickets get color coded with yellow and red respectively.

Determining Priority

The secret to determining priority in help desk ticket management is the act of calculating the emerging impact of the ticket.

For example, if a ticket arrives at 9:39 am that’s from John Doe that states his Microsoft outlook is not loading.

Then shortly after another ticket arrives at 10:01 am that indicates no one is able to access the company portal at the front desk.

Although John Doe’s ticket came in first, it can wait in comparison to the company portal issue.

Which gets tagged yellow for medium priority because of two specific reasons.

One, because the latter issue affects more users, and two because this also includes supervisors and managers.

Another example, let’s say a ticket comes in at 10:24 am that states that the sales department cannot access the credit card website in order to process deals.

This ticket would take priority over the company portal issue and gets marked red indicating high priority.

Simply because it affects multiple users, including supervisors and managers.

But now also the companies money, which is the business bottom line, gets hindered as well.

So the successful help desk ticket management order in this case is; income issue, portal issue, then standard user issues.

Of course, many other variables can impact the scheduling of tickets for first completion.

Just a quick overview of how to decide priority and allocate manpower and resources if necessary.

Troubleshooting, Assigning And Escalating

The next step in successful help desk ticket management is assigning and escalating tickets to the proper IT teams.

Using the previous example of John Doe’s outlook issue, front desk company portal problem and sales down credit card website.

An experienced help desk support technician will first need to troubleshoot the issue using due diligence.

Which is research and analysis of the issue done in preparation for a proper handover.

To distinguish whether tier 1, tier 2 or tier 3 support handles the problem.

With tier 1 being the help desk support technicians themselves.

Which means if they can resolve the ticket at tier 1 they should do so.

In the case of John Doe the technician would likely resolve the issue over the phone or by remoting into the user’s desktop.

Next, in the case of the company portal concern, this will likely get escalated to tier 2 support.

Usually, the on-site technicians who can physically check the computer, internet connections and browser settings.

Lastly, in the case of the down sales credit card website, this issue gets escalated to tier 3 support.

These IT professionals typically manage user access and website servers.

They also have higher permissions than the other 2 tiers to resolve complicated issues.

Service-level agreement (SLA)

While it’s best practice to complete tickets as fast as possible when they first arrive.

That strategy isn’t feasible as demonstrated by the priorities and tiers needed to complete the tasks.

That’s where Service-Level agreement policy comes in.

The time period by which the help desk service providers will start the investigation of the issue.

And the time period in which the issues get resolved and fixed.

Depending on the size of the organization, ticket count and severity.

Typically, companies choose SLAs between 1 and 5 days with 3 days being the most common choice.

But this all depends on the policy.

This gives the technicians the leeway needed to tackle more important tasks first.

Likewise, it also gives them time to come back and complete the lower end tickets as well.

Help desk ticket management isn’t as clear cut as one may like to believe.

It requires the ability to determine priority and escalate to the proper tier in a timely fashion.

As well as the mindfulness to go back and clean up low priority tickets so they don’t slip through the SLA cracks.