IT Help Desk

UX Consultant | Team Leader

Project Overview: Dream Center Education Holdings (DCEH) operates a number of schools across the country and uses a customizable 3rd party IT help desk solution for tracking IT issues reported by end users.  The company has been trying to drive more users to the online self-service portal for initiating IT tickets but haven’t had as much success as they had hoped.  

The Problem: Users are still calling (and waiting on hold) the help desk hotline to report issues instead of opening self service tickets.  When users do use the self-service system they complain that tickets get canceled on them or go into a “black hole” where they lose track of them and have to submit another ticket.  This has created a loss of productivity and finger pointing at IT for not fixing things in a timely manner.  This has been exacerbated by complaints of long hold times and frustrated help desk staff.

Research Findings:

• Current Process

• Pain Points

  • Service Ticket Process

    • There are 2 ticket types - Incidents and Requests.

    • Users must know if their issue is classified as an Incident or Request before submitting a ticket.

    • To get immediate assignment to the IT team that can help them they also know who heads that team and can manually assign them.

    • Often times users guess who can help them or what to classify the ticket.  This leads to ticket reassignment or tickets being converted from incident to request or vice versa.

  • Metrics Reporting Issues

    • When a ticket is converted from an incident to a request or a request to an incident, the existing ticket is canceled and a new ticket is created in its place.

    • The new ticket is assigned a completely new ticket number. 

    • The end user loses track of the ticket because the number has changed.

    • The ticket metrics are skewed to show more tickets are being worked than really are.

• Stakeholder Interviews

  • Help Desk Staff

    • Frustrated with angry callers with long hold times.

    • Ticket metrics are not in line with expectations.

    • Wasting time with tickets that get re-assigned back to the help desk.  A “boomerang” effect. 

  • Users

    • Complain that the self-service ticket system is confusing and they don’t understand it.

    • Do not know what kinds of tickets to submit to get the right result.

    • Would rather call or email IT support than try to use the online system.

  • IT Staff

    • Frustrated that self-service tickets sit in a hold queue and have to be self-assigned manually at regular intervals rather than flowing into the team’s active queue.

    • Often blame the help desk for inaccurately assigning tickets to them.

    • SLA metrics are different depending on ticket type.  ‘Incidents’ are high priority, ‘Requests’ are lower priority.

Design Principles Used:

Hierarchy

Implemented a drop down menu with contextual options based on what the user selects.  This allows the ticket to capture details specific to a particular service or issue.  Based on the service selected and location of the user we automatically route the ticket to the correct team.

Simplicity

Eliminated the different classes of tickets — Incident or Request.  All tickets are treated as Incidents and are assigned as higher priority.  This eliminates the confusion about the ticket selection and enables the use of a user-friendly front-end service portal.

Solution:

Results:

• Virtually eliminated routing and re-assignment circles.

• Eliminated undo ticket cancelations and streamlined reporting metrics.

• Improved ticket close rates by 19%

• Improved ticket response times by 86%