In the first post in our “Data driven Service Desk” series, we dug into the need for ticket management policies. The crux of the post was “for a Service Desk to have real value, ticket management policies must be in place.” However, once you have the ticket management policies implemented, you will have to devise an approach to empowering your analysts to log the tickets your policies require to be tracked.

In this post, we provide five recommendations for improving activity tracking.

One | Quality Ticketing Application

A good Service Desk ticketing system enables improved tracking and efficiency. If you have a poor system in place, it’s more likely that all of the work you’ve done to impose ticket tracking rules will be ignored, and staff will find workarounds to avoid the system.

A good ticketing application has the following characteristics:

• Ticket auto-creation
• Built in knowledge base
• Efficient search
• Asset management feature
• Web portal
• Ability to track purchase orders and software licenses linked with active directory

If your system has the features above and your staff has been trained well in using them, analysts will be incentivized to follow ticket tracking protocol.

Two | User Contact Records in the Ticketing Application

A ticketing system that stores user contact information makes it easier to populate end-user information. The time saved by not having to enter user details should result in faster call resolution time and a better service experience for both parties. Service Desk staff can perform their jobs more efficiently, and users can return to their jobs sooner.

Three | Quick Ticket Templates

It is likely that your Service Desk receives reports of recurring issues. Creating ticket templates eliminates the need for creating an entirely new ticket every time a problem is reported. Instead of completing a myriad of fields describing the problem, it is faster and easier to identify the problem from a curated list.

Four | Standard List of Questions

A standard list of questions should be provided to your Service Desk staff members. The list should address the most common problems they must handle, and the information required for improved resolution and trend tracking.

Examples of potential information that should be recorded are:

• Errors experienced
• Actions taken to troubleshoot
• Previous activity on the issue
• Area of issue

Five | Integration of Asset Management Tool

Integrating an asset management tool with your ticketing application accelerates the speed of ticket logging and troubleshooting. If your analysts have asset information at their fingertips, they can provide quicker entry and more accurate data regarding equipment and software issues.

A well designed and managed Service Desk can considerably increase the efficiency of operations.  With both ticket management policies and an effective, easy-to-use ticketing solution, your Service Desk staff will be able to record and track support requests though call management, call tracking, knowledge management, problem resolution stages successfully.