What haunts any IT manager the most? The lack of a streamlined service process in the organization. This directly affects IT efficiency and productivity, besides the end user’s perception of IT.

Often, organizations use spreadsheets, email, and other legacy applications to log and maintain tickets. However, these methods have their own limitations, such as lack of proper records of past similar incidents and their resolutions, inability to set priority levels on tickets, and much more.

For an IT technician, the lack of a streamlined process spells a lot of time and effort spent in solving requests. But that’s about to change as unorganized ticket management becomes a thing of the past with ITIL®.

ITIL incident management (IM) helps you manage tickets efficiently. Here are six reasons why you will never say “no” to a streamlined IM process.

Workload Prioritization

All tickets may not be equally urgent. Some may have to be addressed immediately, and some can wait until later. For example, a ticket from your CEO might mean you put down that cup of coffee and get to work immediately. IM allows you to predefine ticket priority and set respective service level agreements (SLAs).

Proactive Ticket Management

With IM, you can record common incidents and their solutions in a knowledge base for future guidance. You can also upload this knowledge base on user portals to reduce calls to the IT team. By setting automatic notifications and announcements, you can avoid repeat  incidents. Let’s say a printer stops working. Typically, multiple users would send tickets for this issue, but you can avoid that flood of tickets by simply publishing an announcement stating “we’re working on it.” With IM, you can also proactively set escalation reminders to be sent before any SLA violation.

Reduced Delays

With a structured IM process, you can completely eliminate unnecessary delays in ticket handling, especially delays due to manual ticket assignment, lack of a knowledge base, absence of notifications on SLAs, etc. Business-critical incidents can be quite costly for the business if there are delays in the resolution.

Automation and Efficiency

With IM, tickets can be assigned automatically. This eliminates errors caused by manual ticket assignment, such as overlooking a ticket or even assigning it to the wrong technician. With IM, you can ensure that incidents are assigned to technicians based on their expertise. This way, the resolutions are more accurate and faster. And in turn, the IT team becomes more efficient.

Better Service Quality

To ensure a better quality of service to end users, you can document each resolution for future use. This helps you work ahead of schedule by setting up deadlines and delivery points for your team, which speed up your service. Needless to say, the key to providing quality service is determined focus on efficiency and quickly satisfying users. And IM helps you do just that by putting information and knowledge at your fingertips.

Improved User Satisfaction

With the IM process, you can measure and quantify users’ satisfaction by generating productivity reports, thereby managing and improving their satisfaction. If incident tickets are met on time with proper resolutions or workarounds, your users will be satisfied, and the IT department will stay motivated.

So for the organizations that want to surge ahead of the competition, ITIL processes and tools like ServiceDesk Plus, which offer IM at no cost, are key. Simply leverage the benefits of these tools, and take your help desk to a whole new level.

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The original article/video can be found at 6 Reasons Why You Need Incident Management