There are various types of tickets that come into an IT organization. These include helpdesk tickets, alerts/monitoring, and recurring/proactive tickets. Outside of the service department, you may also have sales engineering tickets, account manager tickets, etc. How do you organize these?
Here are some best practices for ensuring you have each routed properly.
First, ensure you have a single priority system that is applied organization-wide. For this blog, let’s say it is CRIT, HIGH, MED, LOW. We will use these priorities across all ticket categories.
Next, we need to determine a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for each ticket category and priority. Note that while the priorities are all the same across ticket categories, our SLAs are most assuredly different. For example, while a HIGH priority on an alert/monitoring ticket may have an internal SLA of 4-hours, a HIGH priority on an account manager ticket may have an internal SLA of 2 days.
Finally, we want to route each ticket category to its own queue. That gives us these queues:
- HelpDesk
- Alerts
- Recurring
- Account Management
- Sales Engineering
Now let’s map each to our a specific SLA so that the SLA Due Date on each ticket TELLS THE TEAM WHAT TO DO. Put another way, when your team gets overloaded, they should not make “gut decisions” on what tickets to ignore. The ticket priority + SLA will do that. That’s why we make SLAs for non-customer facing tickets much more lenient, yet we enforce them regardless.
Why? Because otherwise that Sales Engineering ticket you keep punting ends up not happening quickly enough and the customer ultimately decides to buy elsewhere because you are too slow to quote!
So let’s do our final mapping of how to organize tickets in your IT company. The SLA due dates are just examples. You need to map those to your needs.
| Category | Queue | CRIT SLA | HIGH SLA | MED SLA | LOW SLA |
| HelpDesk | HelpDesk | 4 hours | 8 hours | … | … |
| Alerts | Alerts | 2 hours | 4 hours | … | … |
| Recurring | Recurring | 1 day | 2 days | … | … |
| Account Management | Account Management | 1 day | 2 days | … | … |
| Sales Engineering | Sales Engineering | 2 days | 3 days | … | … |
