One of the challenges associated with logging a customer request is a ticket classification; a ticket must be accurately classified in order to set the basic for further resolution process. In most support ticketing systems, the process includes request analysis, evaluation, assignment, and priority assessment.
The issues behind the actual classification itself may experience problems in a help desk workflow. Typical schemes are often too complicated, or there are too many labels that when you make your report, none of them are significant. Eventually, the number one categorization becomes “other,” and the classification drops.
When a request is submitted, the best that the analyst can typically do is to identify the service (for which the impact has been predefined) and the urgency of resolution. However, until the incident/request has been resolved, the analyst is not able to properly categorize the “root cause”.
Introducing a classification scheme that works
Help desk needs a scheme that works, and the first question that needs to be answered is: what are you really trying to accomplish with the classification and how do you plan to use this data?
Classification schemes and their strategies for establishing types and categories vary from organization to organization. However, they share some common goals, and for the minimum requirement they should:
- always be agreed between the development group and the service desk
- direct further analysis, evaluation and routing, not attempting to diagnose the root cause
- be as simple and easy to use as possible
- view things from a user perspective, not from an IT organization or technology viewpoint.
Many help desk organizations use a simple “Category / Type” scheme. The problem here, and in any other approach, is that technical staff do not perform classification immediately, but rather relatively non-technical service desk agents and contact persons. As previously noted, the classification does not need to establish a root cause or predict a technical resolution, but rather to enable initial support.
Use the scheme for the entire resolution flow
Support ticket classification and categorization necessarily becomes more refined as the ticket progresses and more is learned via the investigation and diagnosis activities. For a further processing, there should be an additional label or a tag where the root cause can be documented and subsequently recorded and reported.
Using this approach, SympoQ has established a ticket Tags feature, which allows record classification, as well as additional classification that determines the root cause. Tags can be added to a ticket or updated in any stage, following changes in the progress and resolution.
After the tags are set up in the Settings section, the agent is able to classify a ticket using the Tag action in one of the predefined actions:
- Single ticket Tag:
- Bulk ticket Tag:
They can also search for a specific tag in the Ticket list, e.g. “assistance”:
For each tag, you can set the style color and enable improved visual presentation of tags in the list, as well in other reports.
