Ticket bouncing, frustrated end-users – what can IT do?
Ticket bouncing (or ticket reassignments) reduces happiness and productivity for end-users, taking hours away from the business.
It is crucial for IT to understand the impact of ticket bouncing on end-users, so as to identify and solve the underlying causes of excessive reassignments.
Have you ever called a customer service hotline, only to be passed from one service agent to the next while waiting for long periods in between?
Ticket bouncing is the equivalent of that experience in IT support services.
Also known as ticket reassignment, ticket bouncing is where an IT incident or request ticket is passed from one team to another before its resolution.
That mounting frustration you feel waiting on the customer service line? It’s the same for IT end-users.
Ticket reassignments directly reduces end-user happiness and productivity
That’s not just me saying it; it’s something we have learnt from millions of data points from IT end-user responses.
Since the HappySignals Experience Management Platform links end-user feedback with operational data, it has also been able to measure the impact of ticket reassignments on happiness and productivity.
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Our findings, as reflected in the Global IT Experience Benchmark Report H1/2021 , show that 34% of all tickets get bounced at least once.
More importantly, end-user happiness and productivity decrease dramatically each time a ticket is reassigned. Each additional time a ticket is bounced, happiness falls by close to 10 points, while end-users lose over an hour more of their work time.
So what should IT do about this?
Understand the impact of ticket reassignments and identify their causes
You can start by measuring the impact of ticket reassignments on end-users and identifying the causes of ticket reassignments in your own organization.
The HappySignals Experience Management Platform can help you to identify the IT areas from which tickets are reassigned the most times. In this example, I start by looking at tickets with 3 reassignments.
In the view below using sample data for example, you can see that many tickets which were reassigned 3 times were related to Salesforce and Workday.
From this insight, you can work on ways to reduce ticket bouncing for these areas. Once you start identifying where and why reassignments frequently occur, you can automate parts of the process to get that ticket to the right agent without reassignments.
Tackling the underlying causes of unnecessary ticket reassignments will enable IT to provide a more seamless service experience for end-users, and give hours back to the business.
If you are interested in how HappySignals measures and helps you to understand ticket reassignments, watch this episode of Happy in 15 where I give a more extensive demo!
Mitigate the negative impact of ticket reassignments
Even if reassignments are impossible to eliminate, you can still make small but effective changes to the service experience for end-users. For example, end-users are often frustrated when they are not updated about the progress of their tickets.
So each time a ticket is bounced, IT could send end-users a message informing them that their issue is being reassigned to an expert team.
Simple, easy-to-implement changes like these can already make a huge difference to end-users’ perception of IT support!
The link between ticket bouncing and end-user happiness and productivity is too strong to ignore
Our experience working with IT in different organizations has shown us that ticket bouncing has such a pronounced effect on end-user happiness and productivity, that we believe it could be one of the most important ITIL metrics for businesses to improve.
Watch this episode of Happy in 15, where I delve deeper into this crucial topic. I speak to HappySignals Co-founder Sami Kallio, as well as Neville Hughes and Mark Bewick about how Refinitiv incorporated ticket reassignments into their Experience Level Agreements (XLAs).
If you enjoyed watching this, be sure to subscribe to Happy in 15 and never miss an episode. If you prefer to read than watch, stay tuned for more blog posts like this one!
Looking for something even more bite-sized? Check out our recently released Learning Center, where we cover everything from XLAs to optimizing your ServiceNow.
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