Service Desk Workflow
Purpose
This article shows how to move work items between issue states on the Service Desk work board, and visualize the work items in the Service Desk workflow.
General Principles
Abide by the Customer Communication Guidelines when working on customers tickets. Always aim to keep conversations concise and effective. Inform customers proactively of the expected next steps and when those are planned to happen. Close ticket once it’s done. Customer Support tickets are not meant to handle project management work. For bigger requests, projects or big changes, set up project management tasks and attach planned work items to it.
Service Desk Issue Types
| Type | Purpose |
|---|---|
Service Request |
Customer requests support or a service. |
Information Request |
Customer requires information on our services and products. |
Problem |
The customer stumbled upon a problem in his systems or our services to them. |
Incident |
Customer reported a malfunction or interruption of services. And it needs urgent fixing … |
Issue States and How to Move Tickets.
In context of the Service Desk.
Open
Move: New to Open
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Drag and drop (on board)
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Choose transition triage to BlueOPEN on ticket view
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Keyboard shortcut . (with ticket selected on board or on ticket view) → write "triage".
Waiting
Status definition
WAITING is only used when we need an information or reaction from the customer, where we cannot do anything more in this ticket, until the customer has answered. Passive State.
Transition Screen: Waiting
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Ticket gets unassigned automatically
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Add comment to customer. Be courteous when stating what is needed or when requesting them to do something. Proactively inform them of the next steps. See customer communication guidelines.
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Submit.
Automation in Waiting
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3 Days Reminder: If the customer does not reply within 3 working days, a comment will be automatically added to remind the customer of our question.
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7 Days Closure: If a customer does not react to our comment, question, or request within 7 days, the ticket will be automatically closed with an additional comment to the customer.
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Open on comment: If a customer adds a comment, the ticket is automatically transitioned open. This way we know that action is needed from us.
Pending
Status definition
PENDING is only used for internal dependencies, as in "ticket suspended for a short time".Expl. Waiting for a specific time slot to activate a piece of code or small update and such things. Also used for a ticket depending on the progress in a different ticket to happen.
Pending is a Passive State – with automated handling, when a ticket is untouched
Transition Screen: Pending
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Define numbers of days before ticket needs attention again. (1-7)
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If a Task needs to wait significantly longer than a week, consider making a new Planned work ticket for that and close the conversation with the customer for now, letting them know the expected timeline for the next steps.
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If the ticket is depending on a different ticket, interlink them correctly (
causes,waits for,relates to, or by mentioning it in the comment) -
Add comment to customer to keep them posted. (not mandatory in this case) See customer communication guidelines
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Submit.
Automation in Pending
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Delay Timer: after the set number of days, this ticket will be automatically transitioned to open. This way, we know it requires our attention again.
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Open on comment: If anyone adds a comment, the ticket is automatically transitioned open. This way, we know it needs our attention again.
Closed
Status definition
CLOSED is done, won’t do, expired or Duplicate.
For any of these reasons, there is nothing more to do in this ticket. We never close a ticket without a comment on why and what has been done.
- Done
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We did it.
- Won’t do
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there is a reason not to do this, and this reason has been communicated.
- Expired
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Ticket where a customer did not reply within a week. (can be reopened within 7 more days)
- Duplicate
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this might happen if we open a ticket for an incident and the customer does so too.
Transition Screen: Pending
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Set resolution
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If the ticket is relating to a different ticket, interlink them correctly. Not mandatory.
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Add comment to inform customer what was done and how it was resolved. Or why we are closing a ticket, even if it’s not done.
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Submit.
Customer Portal Rules
In this workflow, where we concentrate on short-lived customer request, customer can close any of their tickets in any state, when they see a ticket as done or obsolete. When customer closes a ticket in control.vshn.net they have the possibility to leave a satisfactionrating (1-5 Stars).
Tickets that have received a Satisfaction rating will be displayed under this filter query:
_updated > -60d AND "Customer Satisfaction" is not EMPTY ORDER BY updated DESC_