Ask anyone in IT – maximizing efficiency and minimizing small and monotonous tasks is the gold standard. Being able to streamline processes is absolutely essential in an industry where there’s never a shortage of work to do.
That’s why service desk automation is awesome. Instead of spending hours manually triaging or following up on tickets, let your tools do the work so you can get even more done. By creating automation rules in your service desk, the system can perform actions based on specific triggers and conditions. Setting up Jira Service Desk to be a fully automated powerhouse will save your team hours on the clock. And who doesn’t love getting time back in an already hectic work day?
8 automation pro-tips for your service desk
1. Auto-triage email requests
When email requests come in, it takes a lot of manual work to determine their request type. But, by using this automation rule, you can auto-triage requests to classify them properly based on their content. For instance, if a customer emails about a broken printer, you can have it classify the ticket as “Printer problems.” You can even route issues to the correct person or team by automatically setting the assignee or component field.
2. Automate common tasks
Not every task needs to be handled by a support agent. Why not automate it? For example, if someone needs access to a system, with this automation rule you can automatically send that task to be completed by an external system once it’s been approved. This is a huge time saver for the team because you automate a whole category of requests that the team never has to touch. Everyone loves having less work to do!
3. Prioritize smarter
Don’t spend time manually reading through and prioritizing your tickets – let automation do it for you! With this automation rule, you can use the information the customer provides in the ticket to automatically set a certain priority level. For instance, if a customer reports “Impact: whole team” or “Workaround: none” you can use this information to denote priority level: critical. This in turn helps your team initiate subsequent SLAs based on the priority.
4. Assign tickets to the right people
On some teams, just assigning tickets to the right person is a full time job! Free up your team’s time and automate this function by assigning directly, or setting up a field so that the ticket ends up in the right queue. For instance, if Tom is your expert on all things VPN, then you can automatically assign tickets to him having to do with VPN issues.
5. Set customer expectations
Automation rules aren’t just for triaging and routing tickets. You can even automate your customer communications to set expectations from the start. For example, if you’re using Jira Service Desk to keep track of equipment, you can send emails to your customers letting them know how long they can expect to wait for their new computer/monitor/phone, etc. Set up: IF requestType = laptop request THEN send email, “It takes 10 business days to fulfill an order for a new laptop from our supplier.”
6. Auto-approve tickets
Sometimes requests are small enough that they don’t need to go through an approval workflow. For instance, if you know that equipment requests under a certain dollar amount will always be approved, set up a rule that transitions the tickets automatically into action. For example, “If reqType = purchase order, and value < $200 THEN transition to ‘awaiting purchase’”
7. Escalate urgent SLAs
Make sure your team always delivers on SLAs by using automation. Set a rule that escalates tickets reaching the end of their time to the relevant people, or a senior team member. That way, your manager will discover the problem before it becomes a crisis. In addition, if a ticket hasn’t received an activity within a certain time frame (generally a couple hours), the system will alert relevant people or auto-assign to an agent. Nothing falls through the cracks.
8. Auto-close stale tickets
Don’t let a bunch of old tickets sit around in your queue endlessly. With automation, you can auto-close tickets that time out because a customer hasn’t responded. And if the customer comments, or reopens, the ticket goes live again with little impact. Easy breezy.
These are just some of the ways you can automate Jira Service Desk to do more. It’s up to you how you want to get work done. To learn how to set up automation rules, and get even more automation ideas, check out our automation how-to guide. (See the big green button!)