What is a ticketing system?

A ticketing system allows IT support to be organized, focused, efficient, and effective.This directly impacts costs and revenues, customer retention, and public brand image.Ultimately, ticketing systems are a means to support and help you deal with any issues/incidents in your organization, managing the incidents from the moment they’re captured through to their resolution.

Ticketing systems can help you:

Improve customer retention and brand image

A fit-for-purpose ticketing system, along with best-practice processes, helps organizations prevent major incidents from becoming a very public reality.

Save time and money

Downtime is money. IT professionals waste less time on unnecessary manual processes, freeing up valuable time for more important work.

Get better support, happier customers

By systematically capturing tickets and categorizing them correctly, a ticketing system allows for proper management of incidents leading to quicker resolution times.

Ticket lifecycle stages, from identification to resolution

Identify and capture issues

The initial identification and capture can come from a wide range of sources and an effective ticketing system needs to be able to support them all, and be ready to accommodate the next source waiting to be invented too.

These various sources of issue capture include:

Telephone & walk-up
End users call in or just get to talk to someone in support who can help them when they have an issue or request.

Automatic detection
Monitoring tools should be able to communicate directly with the ticketing system and initiate response before any evidence is apparent to end users.

Email and social triggers
End users now expect to be able to register their concerns and wishes via email and a range of social media channels, with triggers to automatically open tickets.

Direct entry by end user
Aka "self-service" where users can enter their issues directly into the ticketing system, and can also use this direct-access to see the progress and resolution of their issues without needing to call support.

Record issue and track progress

After detecting the issues, we need to record them in a structured manner according to segments like categories, urgency, and impact.

Manage the ticket

Often when considering an organization’s support teams, much of the focus goes on new and challenging issues that require skilled engineers to understand and solve. But in reality, most issues are repeats of things that have happened before; if not identical then similar. The best approach for them should already be known, and recorded in the knowledge base.

Proactively seeking the clues and guidance from the knowledge base and attaching it to tickets within the ticketing system is a major driver for organizational efficiency, and the mark of a high-class ticketing system.

In terms of workflow and automation, and self-service, the most modern ticketing systems should be providing these capabilities to make the lives of IT support staff and end users as easy as possible.

Resolve the ticket

Best practices of updating the knowledge base and doing continual service improvement (CSI) after resolution of tickets ensures:

Alignment of activities and priorities with those of the parent business

Enhancement of the business perception of IT and its services

Saving both time and resources, and improving overall business efficiency

Conclusion

A ticketing system ultimately helps organizations to deliver an integrated and seamless response, offering a range of capture mechanisms and the ability to control progress and keep the people with a vested interest informed.

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Source: http://docphy.com/technology/computers/software/what-is-a-ticketing-system.html