Ticket escalation is essential to ticket management and the ticket process flow. In a nutshell, it's a way to provide quick responses to tickets and keep up with your SLAs – which is crucial if we consider that speed is the number one factor that impacts end-user happiness with IT incident resolutions.
Therefore, escalation is a way to provide the best possible service for users and customers when requests are reassigned to specialized help desk agents.
However, for it to improve your help desk efficiency, it has to be well implemented. It’s not a matter of escalating every single ticket, but to resource to an escalation when there’s an actual need. Don’t forget that the tickets Level 1 agents can’t resolve to end up increasing the workload of your Level 2 agents. So, you’ll need to establish clear rules to avoid overloading specialized employees.
To help you with that, InvGate Service Desk provides you with five different ticket escalation methods, so that you can organize your help desk according to your specific needs. Keep reading to discover them.
How to do ticket escalation on InvGate Service Desk to boost IT support efficiency
We’re aware that ticket escalation criteria differ from company to company, and it depends on how many help desks and types of services are offered to users. So, it is critical for ITSM tools to provide enough flexibility to adapt to different needs.
For this reason, our Service Desk is packed with five ways to escalate tickets, adapting to different scenarios, business complexity, and levels of IT support. Some of them are manual, and others can be automated. Let's break them down!
Manual ticket escalation
Manual ticket escalation typically happens when agents need to refer a request assigned to them to other tiers for its resolution. They have two alternatives to do it:
- Escalation route - This method can be established when creating the different levels of any given help desk. All you need to do is set up an escalation route for the requests.
- The agents’ expertise - In this case, you can assign the most experienced agents in your help desk to the higher levels of service, ensuring that they’ll be assigned requests that match their expertise.
It’s important to mention that InvGate Service Desk also allows administrators to configure the extent of the ticket escalation. Thus, they can choose whether to permit reassignments between different help desks and levels, or only among different levels of the same help desk, thus adapting to each organization's way of handling requests.
Automatic ticket escalation
You can also set up automatic ticket escalations in InvGate Service Desk. They consist of a set of rules that automatically reassign tickets based on predefined criteria.
This means that you can trigger different actions according to the following parameters:
- By user or group of users that created the ticket - This setup is perfect to provide a quick response to key members of your company. For example, if the CEO submits a request, you can set up an automation to assign it to your best agent available.
- By the lack of response/resolution time- If any given request fails to meet the first response time established in the SLAs, you can escalate that ticket immediately.
- By grouping different conditions - You can also configure automation based on a group of parameters, which comes in handy to define the proper action for different scenarios. For instance, you can create an escalation rule for requests related to facilities that contain words such as "emergency" or "urgent" in the subject line and have not been answered within the first 30 minutes.
Key takeaways
As you can see, ticket escalation is a great way to boost your help desk efficiency. By establishing predefined routes and clear parameters to reassign tickets, you ensure your agents’ expertise is used wisely, avoiding that the most experienced ones waste their time-solving Level 1 tickets. Moreover, automation also helps you rest assured that no ticket is left unattended.
Proper ticket routing is a must for companies that aim to provide good service, and since each organization has specific needs, your help desk software must adapt to them.
InvGate Service Desk does so effortlessly and provides you with five different options to scale requests. Plus, by offering both manual and automatic alternatives, it empowers your agents to make quick decisions without having to wait until the automation kicks in.
If you want to see them in action, you can always test them by downloading our 30-day free trial and getting started!
