Do you triage your support tickets?

As a SysAdmin, triaging support tickets efficiently is crucial for streamlining the ticket management process. It is important to have a clear process for triaging tickets, including the fields that need to be populated when a ticket comes in.

In Zendesk, you can create a view for triaging tickets - for example, create a view showing all unsolved tickets that have not been assigned to anyone.

Figure: Zendesk triage view configuration

To triage tickets

1. Assign the ticket to the right person

• If the ticket is addressed to an individual, the ticket should be assigned to that person.
• If not, assess the ticket's technical requirements and identify the relevant subject matter expert.

1. Add a Category

• Tickets should be categorised so that useful reporting can be done.
• Categories could include: User Access, Security, Feature Request, Recurring Tasks.

1. Add a Product

• Similarly, reports will be greatly enhanced if you can determine how much time is being spent on different products.
• Products could include: Azure, CRM, SharePoint, Zendesk.

1. Add a Priority

• Determine the priority level based on the impact, urgency, and predefined guidelines.
• Use a standardised priority system (e.g., low, medium, high, critical) to ensure consistent assessment.

1. Split the ticket if needed (rare)

• If the ticket contains tasks for multiple people, or if it contains multiple big project tasks, you might choose to split the ticket into 2 or more smaller tickets.

You may choose to add other fields that are relevant to your environment.

Figure: Triaged tickets should have an assignee, category, product and priority.