How To Prioritize Help Desk Tickets When Everything Is A Priority?

Most of us today rely on some form of help desk support. Our IT support team ensures the longest possible uptime of the systems and processes that keep your business running smoothly. You and your customers rely on the help desk service to resolve minor technical issues and defects, as well as major IT issues that can impact productivity and revenue. However, prioritizing help desk tickets can be difficult when IT staff are flooded every day for help and everything is a priority.

Your IT team can respond to Level 1 (basic support and troubleshooting), Level 2 (configuration issues, hardware and software repairs, etc.) or Level 3 (network and server infrastructure troubleshooting support) ) Whether you are or not, your IT team will have a hard time dealing with all issues. These are at the same time with the same priority. The help desk team faces the following scenarios every day:

9:30 am-Human Resources Email: "One of our new employees needs a laptop, accessories, and an exact 73 ° C ambient temperature to maintain a proper aura."

9:35 am-James calls the seller. Can I arrange to reimburse this call to my mobile operator? 

9:42 - The CEO's administrative assistant, Rosa, personally visited and said, "The video projector in the executive meeting room doesn't work. If the rest of us want to keep working, it should work." 

Timely allocation and escalation can be challenging in the best of circumstances, as these are an increasing number of tickets and ticket priorities are managed. Needless to say, it shortened the SLA period, support for various technology platforms, and support from a lean support team.

So how do you prioritize help desk tickets if everything is a priority?

As the ITIL Guidelines for IT Support Ticket Prioritization show, staff should prioritize tickets based on urgency and business impact. Ask and answer the following questions to help develop this prioritization process.

• ·         What is the problem?
• ·         How many users are affected?
• ·         What services are affected?
• ·         How fast do you need to solve this?
• ·         Where's the problem or the user?
• ·         Why is this happening?

This approach helps clarify the nature and urgency of the problem that arises, but can create difficulties. For example, when high-priority tickets arrive at the help desk support services, fewer low-priority tickets are resolved, which can lead to new problems. Introducing service level agreements (SLAs) in the ticket prioritization process is an effective solution. SLAs define rules for closing tickets based on the resolution time of the ticket. This allows the user to track the progress of the ticket and invoke escalation if the SLA target is at risk.

Staff can also organize tickets using processes such as:

• 1.       Service Request Priority Ticket Resolution Time
• 2.       New employees need a laptop and accessories Under 1 day
• 3.       Low Sales Team Desk Phone Line High 2 Hours
• 4.       5 hours of video projector from CEO office does not work
• 5.       Mail server is down Critical 30 minutes

Prioritizing tickets allows help desk staff to manage and resolve service requests based on the time remaining. This also makes it easy to organize tickets, update ticket status, and update user progress.

However, managing these processes manually can be inefficient and expensive. With a manual workflow, staff can risk spending time on administrative tasks instead of solving customer problems, throwing balls at important ones, or not communicating effectively with other team members. There is. By automating these processes, help desk staff can spend more time solving problems and spending less time streamlining tickets. This helps build customer satisfaction and an organization's reputation as an efficient problem solver.