The Problem In Your Ticketing System
Are your users constantly complaining about calls being dropped and issues being forgotten? Should they be?
Most computer and network outages stem from errors in the support process—lost requests, open requests not closed when an issue is solved, tickets that remain unresolved and missed alerts.
At 3:07 pm one Thursday afternoon, your business comes to a screeching halt! Your email is broken! Your employees are distracted and unfocused, wondering if they’d just go home early for the day since Microsoft Outlook is offline. A call to the IT department reveals that your exchange server is down—and there’s no estimate at when things will be back to normal.
How can this serious computer headache— along with 82% of other business outages be eliminated?
Most often, your technology suffers when your IT staff is bogged down chasing users’ mishandled tickets that then become time sensitive emergencies! And when your IT staff is overworked chasing tickets, they let important system alerts fall through the cracks!
A simple disk full alert is one of the most-common leaders of outages— when you busy your staff with user issues, you actually compromise your core business functions.
Did you know that most emergencies can be completely avoided if your IT department wasn’t bogged down with the noise coming from mishandling tickets?
And even simple ticket handling errors can add up to serious time drains when your IT guys mess up. Here are 4 of the most common ticket errors—all which lead to wasted time, lost money and unsatisfied or under-satisfied end users.
Source: 2015 Handbook on Business Process Management
But each of these errors leads to additional costs for you!
Lost request— A lost ticket request rightfully frustrates users. Their time is wasted and their productivity compromised. But what’s worse, your IT staff works double time to identify and trouble shoot lost tickets that have escalated to emergencies. The end product: upset users and stressed IT staff—not a pretty picture.
Request not updated when resolved—In this common scenario, IT staff are chasing their own tails! While end users may be satisfied with the ticket outcome, other users may be left waiting for your IT department to realize their mistake. The end product: your IT staff loses time to work on other more pressing issues.
Out-dated Documentation— Time and time again, I find a huge reason why an IT help desk is slow and inefficient is rooted in poor documentation updates. Often, even when documentation has changed, it isn’t accessed and reviewed regularly, leaving technicians with old, outdated or multiple versions of documentation. Your IT team is left with closed tickets that are inadequately fixed or cannot be easily resolved. The end product: unhappy users and an IT team that wastes time solving issues that have already been solved!
Request entry not made— When you have an IT staff that’s already overloaded with solving small problems, it’s very easy for ticket requests to fall through the cracks. Often, internal IT teams are riddled with ticket entry errors—where a user’s problem is never entered in the system. Your users are frustrated and tired of dealing with your IT—90% of the time they end up trying to solve issues on their own! The end product: frustrated users, wasted time and money!
When you look at causes of ticket problems, the upsetting thing is that most often the tickets are easy! But more than not, internal IT departments simply don’t have the resources to identify root problems and optimize their systems to better service their users. That’s why outsourced help desk solutions have and continue to make improvements to the help desk process.
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