5 Signs That It's Time To Break Up With Your IT Ticketing System

Ahhh, the good old IT ticketing system. The backbone of any good service department, right? (Except for your operators, of course.)

When working well, this system will enhance your team's productivity, encourage collaboration between departments, and even enable your customers to fix their own problems.

Sounds like an unattainable dream world, right? Wrong! You should have all of this and more and if you don't, it may be time to break up with your current tool.

Here are 5 signs that it is time to part ways:

1. Your callers do not know what is happening with their ticket.

When an employee has an issue that they need solving, they often need to know when it’s going to be fixed in order for them to factor in potential delays to their day-to-day work. However, often they receive no transparency on when their emails might start working again, or if the printer will be online at some point today. They are frustrated and a have a poor attitude towards the IT Team, even though there are people working their butts off trying to get their issue solved. Talk about feeling underappreciated!

2.     Your agents are manually categorising incoming tickets.

A ticket comes in (through an email or phone call, or self-service portal). Your agent will then decide what the ticket is, what the priority is, what category it falls under, what sub-category it falls under, what assets it might affect, what SLA is attached, and finally who has to solve it. This process that should be close to 100% automated, takes 2-4 minutes per ticket. If you have 100 tickets per week, there is approximately 6 hours of wasted time. Not to mention the frustrations from the service desk because of having to complete the monotonous… Every. Single. Day.

3.     You are typing answers to every single question.

Be honest, how many times a week do you receive the same basic 3 questions? If you do not have standard solutions in place for this, operators end up typing out the same old instructions on how to complete a reset password time and time again. They are frustrated because they aren’t able to tackle exciting projects as their time is drained on simple executions. This is prime automation territory, and again can save hours every week (not to mention the sanity of your IT Agents).  

4.     You do not have a knowledge base as standard (including one available to your end-users)

You are solving a problem for a caller. You have spent an entire hour on it and you are feeling proud of what you have been able to put together for your customer in their desperate time of need. At lunch, you discover your colleague had solved that exact problem a month ago. They even saved their answer into a word document, but because it wasn’t in your software, you received no prompt that a knowledge item even existed. You could have saved hours if you had this information presenting itself to you as you tried to solve the incident. Better yet, you could have made this information public so that the user could have solved their own ticket, and you wouldn’t have had to solve anything! Use each other’s brain power!

5.     Your reporting sucks

As a manager, insights into the performance of your helpdesk are critical for 3 major reasons:

Firstly, you probably need to report up the chain on how you and your team are performing in their roles. How are you executing on your SLAs? Are the costs associated with your team paying off? You will need this information at hand to make your case, especially in circumstances such as new staff hires.

Secondly, it is important to be able to share valuable insights with your team on areas they can develop. How much time are they spending on each ticket, who is picking up the most work and what are the most common tickets you are getting in?

Thirdly, to diagnose common issues. For example, Printer 1 is causing a ticket to be raised every two days, maybe it needs replacing.

If you can’t generate these reports simply and quickly, you are not getting the insights you need and could spend hours trying to get the right data out of your system. Just what you don't need.

Above are just 5 of the main reasons it may be time to call it quits on your current IT Ticketing system.

If it is time for you to break up with your not-so-better half, give me a call.

See you all soon!

Dan from TOPdesk