Imagine visiting three separate doctors and receiving different advice from each of them.
It’s not that you assume any of them are wrong; it’s just hard to know who to trust.
This is what it’s like for end-users when techs don’t have a standardized approach to IT ticketing. Each time they issue a ticket, a different process seems to take place, and as a result the confidence your IT team has built within the organization starts to be undermined.
Ticketing SOPs are a vital tool to avoid this problem and create a seamless, consistent ticketing experience for all parties. But what does that involve? And how can you make it a reality for your organization?
Read on for answers to these questions and actionable next steps for your organization.
A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is a set of rules or instructions for carrying out routine operations. Your ticketing SOPs tell techs how each ticket should be handled, with a clear list of actions based on your organization's best practices.
Historically, these SOPs would have been kept in official documentation that each employee had to manually source and reference. But today, it is possible to embed SOPs directly into your tickets using powerful automation.
81% of ITSM professionals believe working in their team will get harder in the coming year. This has the potential to create internal tensions, especially if individual employees feel their teammates are mishandling tickets.
SOPs make it easier for your techs to collaborate, work flexibly and trust each other. They know exactly how their teammates will handle each ticket and have confidence that they themselves are handling tickets in the best way possible. In turn, this standardizes the quality of ticket resolution and reinforces the trust end-users have in your techs and overall IT department.
Tickets often pass between multiple individuals before they are resolved. The system should operate like a seamless conveyor belt, but every difference in how users treat the ticket creates a speed bump and lowers the overall system’s efficiency.
SOPs remove that friction and help tickets move seamlessly through your organization. Neither techs nor end-users have to think too hard about what is expected of them: it is stated clearly in the SOP, which is embedded in the ticket with a clear task list for each individual.
A recent study found that 80% of the time employees lose due to IT inefficiencies is caused by just 13% of tickets, while 68.8% of tickets account for just 6% of perceived time loss. This suggests that a small number of tickets are being mishandled, delayed or otherwise causing friction for end-users - while the majority of tickets are moving through the system seamlessly.
SOPs help you ensure that this pesky minority of poorly handled tickets are dealt with in the right way. The result? End-users feel they know what to expect when they create a ticket, building trust and confidence in your techs - and likely increase ticketing usage over time.
Categorize your tickets based on whichever factors are most pertinent to your organization. This could mean defining tickets by which department issued them, the kind of issue they relate to, or any other factor that makes a meaningful difference to how techs will handle them.
Consult with your teams to develop concrete SOPs for each type of ticket. These should provide clear instructions, with the aim of making the text skimmable and removing any ambiguous language. Tasks within the SOPs should clearly define who is responsible for completing each task.
Leverage DeskDirector’s smart tickets and Microsoft Power Automate integration to embed SOPs into your automated ticketing system. The system will then use meta data from the ticket to automatically attach your SOPs to each ticket when it is issued.
DeskDirector is an all-in-one ticketing solution that helps you automate your system and deliver an exceptional experience for both techs and end-users. With exclusive integrations that place ticketing directly into the software your teams use every day, we have helped leading IT organizations boost ticketing adoption by 20% and increase ticketing resolution speed by 400%.
Want to produce similar results for your organization?