A help desk ticketing system is software that collects all your customer support requests from various channels and manages them from one place.  A ticketing system allows IT support to be organised, focused, efficient, and effective. This directly impacts costs and revenues, customer retention, and public brand image. 

What does a ticketing system do?

All organisations need a way to efficiently deal with the issues and requests raised by their customers and other users of their services. The nature of the issues raised can vary greatly from organisation to organisation.  

Without an appropriate ticketing system, issues can still be addressed with skill, enthusiasm, and the efforts of committed staff – but these issues will most likely not be dealt with effectively or efficiently.

Do I need a ticketing system?

Ultimately, ticketing systems are a means to support and help you deal with any issues/incidents in your organisation, managing the incidents from the moment they’re captured through to their resolution.

How will a ticketing system help my staff?

Firstly, a ticketing system provides a single, integrated mechanism for capturing, monitoring, and reporting on IT issues. This allows for multiple IT and business benefits, including:

• The meaningful categorisation of tickets 
  Appropriate ticket categorisations are used to help deliver rapid and consistent categorisation of tickets and end-user support across the organisation.
  
  
• Ensuring that all end-user or event tickets are addressed
  Once recorded in the ticketing system, reporting and alerts will ensure that no ticket is missed, forgotten, or lost. You can even use escalation and notification capabilities to flag tickets and to alert relevant personnel if agreed service level targets will be breached.
  
  
• Matching of related tickets to save time and effort
  By imposing the consistency of recording, coupled with links to configuration data, multiple manifestations of a single issue can be matched automatically and referred for a single resolution.
  
  
• Identifying repeat issues 
  Repeat issues can be identified through the consistency of logging and re-allocated to the analyst that has recent experience of this or similar issues.
  
  

A final thought

An appropriate ticketing system and the new capabilities that it can offer is an essential foundation for an IT support organization’s future. If you would like to learn more about help desk ticketing system, contact ABACON IT and remember to visit our website for our weekly articles on the topic.

For more information contact the author, Ryan Danvers at 072 601 2858 or email him at ryan.danvers@abacon.co.za