Web Help Desk Essay

1. Does Web Help Desk offer ticket prioritization based on impact/urgency matrix? How is it set up? (1 mark)

When using Solar Winds Web Help Desk to create a ticket, there is provision to offer ticket prioritization using an urgency impact, and this influence the closure. Setting the priority level of a ticket is a straightforward process and entails clicking the setup button, then selecting the tickets pane and choosing priority levels. The main window will open with ticket priority which one can choose. The priority levels are critical, urgent, high, medium and low. Urgent tickets have shorter closure time and client reminder interval. The new button allows the creation of customer priority levels with corresponding reminders and alerts. The above screenshot depicts the setting up of the ticket priority levels.

2. How are individual incidents linked to a root cause, or problem? (1 mark)

Problem management offers IT professions with the opportunity to address causes of problems that trigger incidents with business impact (Solar winds white Paper, 2016). When using Solar Winds Web Help Desk, it is possible to link an individual event to the causes or problem using the parent-child relationship between assets and tickets. On opening the ticket type, the support representative must select the ticket type by choosing the problem label as seen in the screenshot above. It is the linking of tickets to a problem that enables further investigation of the problems and its resolution. Further input on the problem section of the ticket allows escalations of the problem to other teams for resolution.

3. How are email service request converted into help desk tickets? (1 mark)

The Solar Winds Web Help Desk offers customers the opportunity to submit a service request via email, which the system converts into a ticket. While this process requires additional processing, the alternative provides customers with flexibility. When a customer sends an email to the specified email group, the Web Help Desk parses the email content into respective fields of the tickets and saves them in the system (Web Help Desk, 2017) . The managers in charge of the group email can then allocate appropriate priority levels to the ticket for further processing. The additional work comes with the support team assigning the mail ticket manually to respective technology experts.

4. How are help desk technicians’ performance and customer satisfaction indicators reported or presented?

Solar winds Web Help Desk is a robust tool for tracking the performance of technicians and customer satisfaction index and equally presenting them for utilization in making critical decisions such as motivation of staff or improving service levels. While the Solar Winds Web Help Desk capture data through surveys and similar prompts in the system, it enables the reporting through rich interfaces that make use of graphs to represent data visually (Web Help Desk, 2017) . As seen in the above picture, customer responses on crucial satisfaction indicators are represented in charts and other metrics depending on the type of data captured. The data can also be exported using the TSV format, which enables further analysis using statistical tools.

5. How are change requests (tickets) handled, and how do the change advisory board (CAB) become involved?

Changes within organizations cannot be ignored as they often and have serious ramifications should anything go wrong during the process. The Solar Winds Web Helpdesk enables management of change tickets with a facilitation of seamless voting on the tickets. When a change request is made in the system, the users have the option of selecting the appropriate change advisory board (Solar winds white Paper, 2016). On saving the request, the system will send a vote to the CAB, who can then approve or deny the request. All voting process by CAB is saved in the system for future references.

References

Solar winds white Paper (2016). Retrieved https://www.solarwinds.com/- /media/solarwinds/swresources/whitepaper/nextgenerationcustomersupport.ashx

Web Help Desk (2017). Getting Started Guide. Retrieved from https://support.solarwinds.com/Success_Center/Web_Help_Desk_(WHD)/WHD_Documentation