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Email or Service Ticket? Why & When to Choose Service Tickets

Email or Service Ticket? Why & When to Choose Service Tickets

When your team members have problems or issues related to IT, they typically have options on how to proceed.

They can:

  1. Ignore the problem (do nothing)
  2. Email someone
  3. Create a service ticket

There may be a few other more “creative” options, but these are the big three. It’s not hard to see why #1 is a problem— IT issues rarely go away on their own.

But what about options 2 and 3? Shooting an email over to someone more knowledgeable is enticing for the employee: their tech-savvy coworker might have a quick solution that gets them out of a jam.

As a managed IT service provider, we always recommend option 3: creating a service ticket. Today we’ll show you exactly why service tickets are the better option — and how to know when you should create them.

Permanence

As tempting as that quick email might be, let’s be real about how email works in today’s offices. Emails can quickly become white noise, just background static that gets selectively ignored.

And even if your email recipient sees your message and realizes it’s important, emails tend to get buried — fast. If your tech-savvy coworker can’t address your problem right away, that email will get buried by dozens of other updates and issues.

Contrast that with the service ticket: service tickets never go away and are never deleted. Even once the issue has been resolved, service tickets stick around in archive form in case a similar issue pops up again later.

Clarity

Service tickets also enable greater clarity. By requiring employees to fill in specific fields, your IT department or IT partner can be sure to have all the needed information the first time, rather than after prolonged back-and-forth over email. 

IT professionals can also update the information in the ticket, adding in jargon and technical details that other pros will need to resolve the issue. This doesn’t really work via email: we don’t need to remind you of the problems that occur when people add and remove recipients from email threads, creating chaotic branching threads.

Also, when more information is needed, all that information gets stored in the ticket itself— not in a jumbled email thread.

Escalation

How does an employee escalate an email? Forward it to their boss? This creates all the same problems we’ve been describing, with branching threads, white noise, buried emails, and so forth.

In contrast, an IT ticket can be reviewed daily or weekly and escalated in clear, organized ways. If the responding IT technician cannot solve the problem independently, service ticket software systems allow that tech to escalate the ticket and loop in the relevant parties.

Reopening

Service tickets can be reopened if an issue that had been resolved ever pops up again. Here again, tickets are far superior to email: they create an instant alert and also provide instant context of what happened last time, saving time and speeding up the resolution process.

That said, if you’re a current Sunstate customer, help us out in two ways:

  1. Do not respond to (and thus reopen) a closed ticket to say “thank you”. We appreciate your thanks, but this gums up the works. Instead, give us feedback on the Crewhu survey you should receive via email when the ticket is closed.

  2. Do not reopen a closed ticket to report a new, different issue. Each issue should stick to its own ticket. 

Got questions about implementing an IT ticketing system like this, or about finding a better solution for your IT needs? Reach out to us today!

 

Sunstate

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