Service Desk employees are often faced with the situation that they do not know if the user that is calling is reporting an incident or has a request for service. By using a good questioning technique he can try to find out what the caller really wants and can then open the correct ticket. But until it is clear what the caller really needs or wants, no ticket can be opened because the decision if it will be an Incident Request or a Service Request must be made first. There is no out of the box “conversion” if the ticket afterwards. So how to deal with that?

To make a Service Desk employees life easier we created an Intake Form that allows to register all relevant information before making choice about the correct ticket type. The information can be entered in some form and at the very end the employee can choose if it is an Incident or a Service Request. If needed, the requests can also be resolved/completed immediately (quick fix).

The Intake Form is started from the tasks pane.

Now some information needs to be filled out. At the end, the selection about the ticket type can be made.

When “OK” is hit, the selected request is created. If it is not resolved/completed automatically, the ticket is opened and more information can be added if needed.

Another thing that makes a Service Desk guys life easier …

Credits to Stefan Johner (http://scsmlab.com, @scsmlab), one of our Cloud Engineers who build the form and and logic behind. Also many thanks to Kurt van Hoecke (http://authoringfriday.com, @BunkCo) and Rob Ford (http://scsmnz.net, @Manxferdey) for the great input and the interesting discussions around this topic.

For a more complex example of an intake form check this link –> http://www.authoringfriday.com/2013/04/14/scsm-showcase-incident-request-intake-task/

Cheers
Marcel