Does your IT support have an ingrained process to keep your tickets low? DynOps presenter, Seth Goodell, explains how an optimized ticket flow process saves your users downtime and headaches when resolving their issues.
When your business has computer problems, are you sitting around waiting on your IT support to get issues resolved? Do they regularly contact you with updates? When you submit a ticket, are you sure that the guy working on it has you in mind—with his top priority mission to get your issue resolved?
Realize that IT guys (myself included!) often like to solve problems. That means, we’ll spend hours—even days!—thinking about and figuring out issues. And, in my experience, that is how many IT departments or IT managed service providers tend to work. The technician that is helping you resolve an issue is spending countless hours working on your problem.
What’s wrong with this way of working tickets?
It’s frankly very inefficient. Over the course of 17 years building Dynamic Edge to be customer-centric, I’ve realized that our ticket flow process has to keep your business in mind, much more so than simply closing your tickets. And a big part of focusing on you and your team getting back to work is making sure our ticket flow and ticket escalation processes are geared towards resolving your issues fast and effectively. Giving you the right resolution, while making sure you get back to work—especially if the computer issue is causing you or your team to not be able to get their work done!
How has Dynamic Edge optimized their ticket flow process to get your team back to work and well-informed on how their computer issues are being handled?
There are 3 main reasons:
Organization of the IT Support Team— we have found that a tiered ticket flow system gets our customers the best results when it comes to resolving issues from simple printing problems, to complex network configuration issues. We use a 3-tier system to resolve your issues:
Front Line—the front line team takes your tickets as they come in. We are dedicated to answer EVERY call live when it comes in (that means no returned calls needed). Front line documents your problem (they follow a checklist to make sure every known reason for your computer symptoms are addressed). If the issue is easy to fix, they will tackle your issue on the phone (the average call lasts just under 15 minutes). Front line technicians can resolve most issues quickly because Dynamic Edge has a growing body of peer-reviewed documentation related to known computer issues across all of our users (I explain this below).
Second Line—if front line cannot easily resolve your ticket with documentation we have in place, a second line engineer experienced in handling issues related to your problem will tackle the problem. (Note: because of our extensive and easily searchable documentation system, over 80% of your user tickets will be resolved with a front line tech). Second line people will research your issue—they may have to call vendors to determine a resolution strategy. When a second line technician resolves a computer problem, they document their resolution so that front line will be able to use the resolution for future callers with a similar problem.
Third Line—if the second line technician is unable to resolve an issue, they escalate the ticket to the third line. Third line engineers are well-versed in the most technical and very complicated network and computer issues. Third line technicians will give second line technicians a clear resolution path to resolve your issue. Third line also evaluates current documentation to ensure it is complete.
Evolving Documentation— having complete and clear documentation on how to resolve your issues is critical to get your users back to work. Why reinvent the wheel every time an issue arises? We’ve found that having clear and actionable documentation reduces ticket closure time by nearly 40%! Every time a ticket is touched, we make sure the technician that worked the ticket documents what they have done in the ticket. When a previously unknown issue arises, our engineers create knowledge articles describing how to resolve the issue.
But we’ve found that simply having documentation isn’t enough. Our entire team is required to use and review documentation—when documentation gets a ticket closed, the tech gives it a thumbs up. When documentation needs clarification, the tech adds additional info in the article to help the next tech get a similar problem resolved quicker. We’ve spent over 16 years creating, reviewing and cleaning technical support documentation. Our team constantly is using it, improving it and closing more tickets faster.
Since technology is constantly changing and problems are getting more complex, we are actively reviewing, updating and creating new documentation on issues to make sure you can get back to work.
Transparency, Tracking and Accountability of Ticket Handling— Part of having an efficient ticketing process is tracking tickets, making our ticket flow transparent and holding people accountable to resolving your issues. When your ticket is being handled, you get email updates in real time as to what a tech is doing. We are transparent to our users—they are kept in the loop at every stage in resolving their issues—by email and phone.
We have ticket flow managers that oversee where tickets are going and to make sure tickets don’t get stalled (another problem with your run-of-the-mill IT support team!). The ticket flow manager follows up with technicians and makes sure they are working on the ticket for a specified time (if an engineer cannot get a resolution in 30 minutes, they pass the ticket to a more experienced set of eyes). We hold our team accountable to the 30 minute rule (instead of having one person spend days resolving an issue that might have taken another tech more familiar with an issue a few minutes).
While there are many additional factors that we consider important in giving your users the IT support they deserve, having a dedicated team following a ticket flow process is one of the biggest ways to get your users back to work quickly. If your IT support team doesn’t have a system, if tickets are randomly assigned or there is no clear escalation path, then your users are likely not getting what you’re supposedly paying for. If your users are not kept in the loop and your tech team does not have a concrete process to follow when handling EVERY ticket, they are not working efficiently (and likely impacting the rest of your team members’ productivity!).
Is your IT support team really working the most efficiently to get your computer problems resolved quickly, while keep you in the loop? Can your business survive downtime? Are you content not knowing what’s wrong with your network? Contact us TODAY for a FREE ticket flow health assessment.
