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What's your approach to this help desk procedure issue?

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JavaJones:
I agree. Nobody in the conversations I had was arguing against ticket systems as a whole, rather some felt that the system should just never be exposed to users and tickets should *never* be "auto" generated. They always wanted to be the ones creating tickets, entering data, etc.

One of the other unspoken issues with this is the overhead involved in adding back-and-forth communications details to your ticket system (unless you move to ticket system based communications once a ticket is opened). In other words let's say you receive a help request by email, you reply to the user to get more details, they respond and you open a ticket with the full info gathered so far. Now, do you move to ticket updates through the ticket system, or do you keep going via email? If the latter, then you should really be recording the pertinent info in the email back and forth into the help desk system. With all communications going through the system, that's never an issue.

In the end it's all about what works for people in their respective environments, of course. Different strokes for different folks.

- Oshyan

40hz:
How do you feel about this level of access for individual users?
-JavaJones (April 13, 2011, 06:23 PM)
--- End quote ---

I think it's a great idea that seldom works well in the real world.

IMO most client generated ticket systems are mainly put in place for public relations purposes rather than for practical reasons. They're often nothing more than a fancy in-box. In most places, a client generated ticket does little more than act as a call tag for a technician.

It's then given to a helpdesk technician for triage. The tech needs to:


* contact the client
* get the client's story
* extract additional or missing information about the problem
* tentatively identify and classify what the real problem is
* edit the original ticket so that it's actually usable by support staff
* assign the request a priority code
* formally place it in the support queue
In short, someone still needs to talk to the client first before they can correctly enter the support request on the system. So it's generally immaterial, from a support perspective, whether the original ticket was client-generated or not. All support requests need to be reviewed.

JavaJones:
Yes, that's a very good point indeed 40hz, and I agree. I do still prefer the option of auto-generated tickets and have found that in a good number of cases I don't actually need to change too much about the original ticket, only add additional info. But it does vary widely between organizations and the typers of users and problems they have.

One additional factor we haven't discussed is the perspective that some expressed to me which was that one person would generally be the "ticket manager" and be transferring tickets into the system from phone and email requests. This to me is perhaps the least sensible part of it, assuming you have multiple techs, because one person can become a bottleneck. But in the case of very small departments of only say 2 or 3 people, maybe it makes sense? That's certainly what was being presented to me at least. I'm still not sure I buy it. It seems to me it's preferable in that case that emails automatically generate tickets that everyone can self-assign and follow-up on. But sometimes I guess that level of control may be useful.

- Oshyan

40hz:
I do still prefer the option of auto-generated tickets and have found that in a good number of cases I don't actually need to change too much about the original ticket, only add additional info.
-JavaJones (April 14, 2011, 03:42 PM)
--- End quote ---


If you have savvy users who understand much of the tech they're using, having them generate their own support tickets should work out very well. If that's the case with where you are - go for it! :Thmbsup:

I've never been that lucky. ;D

JavaJones:
Hehe, it's been a mix. Certain kinds of tickets and/or certain users, yes. Others, not so much. In general I find it a win to auto-generate, but definitely see how it might not be in other situations.

- Oshyan

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