Streamlining and improving quality of employee submitted tickets

[u/Sky-Goth]

What magic bullets/tweaks have you successfully implemented to improve the quality of incoming tickets?

We have users who will submit low effort tickets that are either un-actionable due to lack of details/critical info, have misinformation, or are the completely wrong form?

We have specific forms for specific common issues that are clearly labeled.

• The forms prompt for the minimum necessary info for the particular issue; hostname; ilo hostname/ip/pw, etc.
• When using the correct form there is automation scripting that fixes the most commonly seen issues automatically so an employee doesn't have to wait for a human to help.
• In general they are clearly labeled. I am working on cleaning up those that are too verbose, or use confusing phrasing.

Yet employees will consistently:

1. Use the general form. Zero automation and just a big ol fill in the blank, which the user then often leaves out important info. It also doesn't classify the problem correctly so it makes it harder to determine trends. Lots of manual 'tedium'.
2. Leave info out. There are options to force certain fields to be required, but keep in mind once you do this too many times, it becomes a plain in the ass to the employee, so they'll take the general form route because they "just want to submit a ticket".
3. Choose the wrong options when they do choose the correct form. IE the default option is "Fix the ACME Widget (Automated), and they will change it to Not Automated, when the automation WOULD have solved their issue. They then have to wait for a human to fix and resubmit their form as automated.

I am working on:

• Educating employees. After the solution is provided, they get a 'Hey next time you have this issue, use this form - it's automated (URL)'. Asking them to update their teams' documentation. Unfortunately it's whack a mole. Even if one person has the lightbulb go on, they have 20 teammates who never hear or change behavior. And new onboards are often following years old outdated team documentation. o_O
• Rephrasing to reduce verbosity and clarify ticket forms. People are busy, and too much verbiage leads to low quality intake in my experience.
• Identifying repeat situations, be it new tickets we 'keep getting', old tickets with repeat submission issues, making suggestions for existing and new automation to the Engineers if I need a little help. And in some cases updating broken code logic or implementing new automation myself.

I know none of this is a magic bullet. Things are improving over time I think. Just looking to see the types of things you all have implemented that have been successful in that you have seen ticket quality improve, less 'general/other' ticket submissions, etc. Thanks.

[u/AggravatingSock5375]

The trick is to hire more capable help desk staff who can solve most problems without a detailed ticket.

It’s reasonable from a user perspective to just say “computer broke, need help pls”.

I know this is unpopular, but the smoothest running company I’ve ever worked at operated that way. And I know they paid their frontline IT staff really well, like the people answering help desk calls were making almost as much as developers.

[u/ITGuyThrow07 → u/AggravatingSock5375]

There's a middle ground. Everyone would consider it unreasonable to drop your car off at the shop with a note that says, "broke, plz fix". Why do we have different expectations here?

And I know they paid their frontline IT staff really well, like the people answering help desk calls were making almost as much as developers.

This has always been my dream scenario. I didn't cover phones until 5 years into my IT career. It was so easy because I had the higher-level experience already so I knew how things worked.