Ã¢â‚¬â¢ What Factors Do You Consider When Prioritizing Service Requests That Are Assigned To You?

FAQ: How do you prioritize service requests?

03/23/2017

Ring Binder with inscription High Priority on Background of Working Table with Office Supplies, Glasses, Reports. Toned Illustration. Business Concept on Blurred Background..jpeg On boilerplate, we receive near twoscore new service requests (nosotros call them 'tickets') a day. Some days that number can exist much higher. Tickets can be annihilation from a password reset for a user to printer issues for a department to a server outage affecting an unabridged company.

Managing and prioritizing these tickets is a job in itself. Our dispatcher and service squad leadership accept to determine in what social club these tickets are worked on (hint: it'south not first come up, offset serve) and who will work on them. Nosotros utilize a few different criteria, the master being client agreement and result severity.

Client Agreement

One of the factors impacting how rapidly nosotros accost a ticket is the blazon of agreement the client is in. We offer a few different levels of agreements for our IT support clients, which affect priority:

All Yous Tin Swallow – This is our total retainer agreement. Customers in these agreements have the highest priority.
Block Fourth dimension – In this understanding, customers pay a set fee for a block of hours towards IT support. They have the second highest priority.
Fourth dimension & Cloth – Customers in this agreement simply pay for the hours they utilize each month. These agreements accept third priority.

When our clients sign an agreement, it includes a Service Level Agree (SLA) that outlines how rapidly nosotros will respond to their tickets. For the highest priority customers, the following table is a reasonable representation of our response times (these are maxiumums - internally, we shoot for much faster times!):

Critical – 1 hour
Astringent – 2-4 hours
Normal – 4-8 hours
Asking – 8-12 hours

Please note, this is how quickly we will commencement working on the ticket. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee how long information technology volition accept to solve an issue (we wish we could!).

Since our agreements are month-to-month, it's possible for a customer to change understanding types if they need a faster response time.

Consequence Severity

The other factor impacting how quickly we address a ticket is the consequence severity. We await at the urgency and touch on of an event on a uncomplicated scale of Low, Medium, High. We use a 3x3 matrix to help identify the severity, which is then classified in one of four categories:

Asking: This is typically something that is more of an annoyance than a work stoppage, like a single user is unable to print.
Normal: This is more than severe than a asking and may be causing a piece of work slowdown for a few people but typically doesn't involve a total outage. An case would be several people having trouble with the desktop version of a program, but the web version is working fine.
Severe: This is generally something that prevents a user (or a modest group of users) from working, merely doesn't affect the whole company, similar an accounting user that cannot get into Quickbooks.
Disquisitional: This is the highest level of severity and will get the highest priority. This is a major outcome affecting nigh or all of the visitor similar a server down or an net outage.

Assigning Priority

One time we take these criteria into consideration, we decide which ticket gets assigned side by side. While our response time goals are set the by the SLA, both severity and understanding are considered.

So, let's look at a few examples. In these examples, Visitor A has an All You Can Eat Understanding and Visitor B has a Block Time Agreement.

Both companies put in a ticket for a astringent issue, affecting roughly the same number of people at both companies. Visitor A'due south ticket is going to take priority.

Company A puts in a normal ticket and Visitor B puts in a critical ticket. In this example, Visitor B'southward ticket is going to accept priority.

We know that when you're having technology problems, waiting effectually for someone else to fix information technology is annoying at best. If information technology's keeping you from working, and you don't have any thought how long information technology volition accept to even exist addressed, it's more than a trivial frustrating. We practise our best to get to tickets as speedily every bit we can – but as apace as nosotros tin may be a few hours after you put in the ticket.