Shared services · IT and HR shared services
Improving first-contact routing in an internal service desk
Tickets were routed by keyword rules written four years earlier. Roughly a third were re-routed at least once, and re-routed tickets took three times as long to close.
- Company shape
- GCC, 2,000 to 5,000 seats
- Timebox
- 7 weeks
- Systems
- Ticketing platform, Identity provider, Knowledge base
IllustrativeThis write-up is a composite drawn from work of this shape. It is labelled because presenting a composite as a single engagement would be a fabrication.
Before
The state we started from
Tickets were routed by keyword rules written four years earlier. Roughly a third were re-routed at least once, and re-routed tickets took three times as long to close.
The decision
What had to be decided first
The metric was re-routing rate rather than handling time, because re-routing was the observable cause of the delay. The service desk manager owned it. Validation was a four-week live comparison with the rules engine running in parallel.
Built
What was actually built
A classification service that proposes a queue and a priority with the evidence it used, applied automatically above a confidence threshold and sent to a human router below it.
What changed
Re-routing rate fell from 31% to 12%, and median time to correct owner fell from 4.1 hours to 1.3
- Measurement window
- Four weeks live, parallel comparison with the prior rules engine
- Methodology
- Counted from ticketing platform audit history. Only tickets in the same categories present in both periods are counted. Human router time below the threshold is included.
What did not work
Automated resolution of password and access requests was cut from scope. The identity boundary was undefined for two of the three affected systems, so the work was stopped rather than deployed with a gap.
Systems involved
- Ticketing platform
- Identity provider
- Knowledge base
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Next step
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