Streamlining Spam and Duplicate Ticket Management in Autotask

Handling spam and duplicate tickets efficiently is crucial for maintaining the effectiveness and productivity of your helpdesk operations. While most helpdesk applications provide features for managing such tickets, implementing a clear and structured process is key to ensuring smooth workflow and accurate reporting. In this blog, we’ll delve into best practices for managing spam and duplicate tickets in Autotask, offering practical solutions to streamline your ticket management process.

Managing Spam Tickets

In Autotask, deleting tickets can lead to complications and is not recommended due to the difficulty in retrieving deleted tickets (this is a common problem of almost every helpdesk solution out there). Instead, establish a workflow centered around execution and audit.

Create the Execution Process

• Create a dedicated queue named “Spam / Trash Bin” to handle spam tickets.
• Develop an Autotask Ticket Form (speedcode) named “SPAM” that sets the Queue to “Spam / Trash Bin” and the status to Complete.
• Restrict non-managerial staff from deleting tickets by updating Security Levels.
• When technicians encounter spam tickets, they can simply assign the “SPAM” speedcode to move the ticket to the designated queue and close it.

Create the Audit Process

To ensure accountability and cleanliness of your helpdesk queues, establish an audit process:

• Set up a Recurring Ticket against your Autotask Account to create a weekly task for the service manager.
• Instruct the service manager to review all tickets in the Spam queue, verify their validity, and purge the queue accordingly.

Benefits

• A clear workflow resembling standard business practices.
• Accurate reporting with clean helpdesk queues.
• Prevention of valid tickets from being mistakenly deleted by technicians.

Handling Ticket Merging

Ticket merging is a common practice, but if not managed properly, it can distort reporting metrics. To mitigate this issue, designate a specific queue for merged tickets:

• Create a new queue named “Merged Tickets.”
• Update the Autotask System Settings under Service Desk to move merged tickets to the “Merged Tickets” queue.

By implementing these measures, Autotask will automatically relocate merged tickets to the designated queue, ensuring accurate reporting and streamlined ticket management.

Ticket Merging – Power Up

If you want to take this a step further, you can also automate a warning being sent to customers that email into a duplicate/merged ticket. This helps prevent the disaster of a customer emailing into a non-monitored ticket.

1. Create a Ticket UDF named “Is Duplicate Ticket” as a list with the options: Yes, No
2. Create a Ticket WFR that sets “Is Duplicate Ticket” to Yes when Queue Changes To ‘Merged Tickets’
3. Create a Ticket WFR specific to this queue that detects when Status Changes To “Customer Responded” AND “Is Duplicate Ticket” Equal Yes and sends a warning email to the customer.

Conclusion

Effectively managing spam and duplicate tickets in Autotask is essential for optimizing helpdesk operations and maintaining data integrity. By establishing structured workflows and implementing best practices, organizations can mitigate clutter, enhance reporting accuracy, and improve overall efficiency in ticket management.