Unassigned Incidents

[#1]

How are others processing the Unassigned tickets generated via email and Self Service? I want to ensure they don't stay Unassigned for too long, but because of our setup it is difficult to find an effective way of managing them. I'm thinking of auto-assigments based on some sort of criteria which distributes Unassigned tickets evenly throughout the team. Any suggestions?

[#2]

There are two classic approaches:

1) Use assignment rules (as you proposed) to automatically assign these sorts of tickets to somebody.

2) Give one (or more) folks in your organization responsibility for manually assigning these tickets and give them a link on their menu structure that lets them quickly see the list of unassigned incidents.

Of these two, option 1 is usually better since it requires less human interaction. In practise though, you'll probably find that not everything can be clearly auto-assigned, so you may well end up auto assigning, say, 80% of your incidents and still rely on a human to do the last 20% that the rules didn't cover.

[#3]

We used a combination of pats suggestions. I created a gauge that only the help desk can see. The help desk is responsible for all unassigned incidents. This is to be monitored by the team at all times on a 15 minute basis. On top of that there is a rotation setup with 2 members of the help desk being primarily responsible to monitor the unassigned incidents. Everyone is still responsible to make sure the incidents are picked up but the 2 person team is just a backup guarantee. These 2 people will have the responsibility to either address the incident or get another member of the team to work on the issue. On top of that I generate an email to the help desk group informing them that there has been a ticket opened but is unassigned.

No one on the team really has an excuse if something is missed and as it has been reported to me no unassigned incidents have been missed or responded to in an untimely manor. This approach has actually made self serve jump from around 3% to about 40% of the help desks work flow. This in turn freed up the email system because people felt more assured that there issue would be addressed as long as they had an incident number verses them only sending an email that gets mixed in with hundreds of other emails about outages, maintenance, and a myriad of other things. This has been a very solid approach for us.

One last thing on the subject of self service. All of our technicians are sending emails that state the following when corresponding with the user base.
Need your incident placed immediately? Use our "Self Service" system at http://www.service-now.com/yourinstance
or by clicking the "Service Now" link on the company portal website.

[marcguy]

we use that approach too, nice gauges and unassigned incidents link and an e-mail notification saying caller 'auser' has logged a self-service call.
seems to work well and more and more people use it all the time.

[stephfour]

Ooh, e-mail notification. That's a nice addition that I'll have to look into. SO far we've been doing okay with getting unassigned tickets assigned by Helpdesk staff.