Tickets, Tickets, Tickets, Tickets! (or, How to Create “Good” Tickets)
Tickets, ticket tickets. Tickets tickets ticket (tickets), tickets tickets.
Stop! I don’t want to paraphrase Doug Zongker’s celebrated “Chicken” paper and speech (you can find it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk) that probably had a bigger influence to science than Hugo Ball’s Dadaism poems to culture…
Ok, let’s come back to our topic! …Tickets, tickets, tickets! Of course, anyone working in an IT department hopes to get as few tickets as possible. However, problems need to be solved and we want that every request is recorded in the ticketing system, so that nothing gets lost and that all the work done is visible. So, how can we bring requests into the system in the most efficient way?
From the perspective of your colleague in the marketing department it would maybe be most efficient to ask you during the coffee break (while paying you the coffee, if you’re lucky 😉 ). For the responsible of the warehouse it would be to phone you personally (he saved your direct number on a speed dial button labelled “IT Guru”) and for the sales person it would be to call the IT support number… all of them disturb your workflow and create additional work on your side!
Emails to the support mailbox are a lot better, but the final aim should be to get people to use a self-service portal. There, you place your request, typically by classifying the type (annoying and error prone) and describing the issue in free text. How boring…!
Let’s come to the point and collect some ideas on how to make the self-service portal more appealing and the requests more accurate!
- A search function to find the correct request categories as you type, similarly to Google search, clicking on a result to create a ticket (the “Ticket from service” in EriZone)
- Buttons with pictograms, like icons for vegetables on supermarket scales, to create pre-defined tickets (the “Quick tickets” in EriZone)
- Report a problem with one of your devices, selecting it from your devices list in the self-service portal (See the MyAssets functionality https://www.neteye-blog.com/2018/12/do-you-know-my-assets)
- Create an IT hardware request by scanning a barcode or QR-code of a registered asset (see https://www.neteye-blog.com/2018/09/creating-tickets-from-qr-codes-and-asset-numbers)
- Create a facilities request by selecting the position of an object on a map of your company buildings (this is not yet available)
- Go through a questionnaire that leads you to suitable FAQ entries or ticket request templates (this neither…)
- Implement a speech-to-text Skill for creating tickets with Alexa or Google Home (neither this…)
Do you have other ideas?
Mirko Morandini
Author
