My group is presently in the early stages of planning a Help Desk software implementation. We’ve started building the all-important topic list for tickets, trying to organize and categorize all the different types of issues with which we are presented.
Knowing that there will be a user self-help web page, where users can create their own Help Desk tickets, some questions are emerging about how this topic list should be constructed. On the one hand, a very detailed list is obviously necessary from the IT side because we need to be able to categorize and report on each issue type. Also, this detailed list will allow the HD software to route self-service tickets to the appropriate IT group based on the category the user selects. But, here’s the issue: a detailed list imposes a degree of self-diagnosis on the user, and we can’t necessarily expect users to know which category to pick. Janie in Finance just knows that when she points to this thingie on her screen and clicks her mouse, this other screen is supposed to appear where she enters her receivables, but it’s not doing what it’s supposed to — she doesn’t have a clue whether it’s a software, hardware or network issue, and forcing her to choose from a detailed list is just frustrating and confusing.
So on the one hand, the more closely a user can specify the problem the more we can leverage the HD software’s automation — but on the other hand, users are being called on to pre-troubleshoot their problem, and as a result the ticket may get sent to Networking when in fact it needs to go to Applications Support. Do we give the Self Help page a dumbed-down problem list, and lose the HD software’s routing and automation for those tickets? There’s a balance to be reached, and I’d like to know how other organizations have dealt with finding that balance.
Thanks,
-Michael
