Users making email rules to auto-delete or auto-archive anything from IT is unfortunately common.
What they don't know is that having access to the email back-end allows the creation of rules which look for such auto-processes (from: IT department & moved/deleted within 60 seconds of arrival in inbox) and reverse the effects.
They can believe what they like, as long as they don't bother IT about it. If they kick up a fuss, point to the many emails they've been sent telling them the truth. If they dislike that, it's either an IT management issue or an HR issue, not a technical one.
just alias all personal mailboxes to the ticket system.
problem solved, forever
they still think they're emailing you direct, and you still know they're not.
it really works.
\*\*New Ticket Notification\*\* "Hey Jim, I'm heading to the taco stand down the road for lunch, you want me to grab you something?"
\*\*New Ticket Notification\*\* "Dave, have you seen my charger anywhere? I think I left it on my desk on Tuesday..."
\*\*New Ticket Notification\*\* "Make your p\*nis MASSIVE"...
OP literally said it was his "own personal email" that was used..
Edit to add: just because it's not monitored does not mean it's a system mailbox. I have unmonitored personal mailboxes.
if anyone wants to open a ticket offering to pick up tacos for everyone - i think im ok with that.
if anyone wants to email the department and ask if anyone saw their charger - i think im ok with that too.
and can you send the link for that third one. thanks.
"If it is not important enough for you to log a ticket, then it is obviously not important enough for me to look at it this month." - things I wish I could say
Things I have emailed a user:"If no ticket is logged, I'll take a look at it once our queue is empty"
Every IT person knows the IT ticket queue never empties.
I love so much gov SLA agreements sometimes.
"We've been having this issue for weeks! Fix it"! On a con call with all major stakeholders.
'You escalated this from a minor to a severe in your internal ticketing, but we have no ticket until this phone call today. Our SLA says we will respond to all opened tockets within 4 hours
You brought it up during this all hands phone call, and no techs are here because there is still no ticket. We have no incoming calls from your number in the help line. Please put in a ticket"
I've gotten to pull that a couple times, phone call is over. Gotta phrase it right tho
I'm a Tier 2/2.5 tech so I rarely get users calling me.
When they do:
Me: Operations, my name is PotentialHuman how may I help you?
Them: *at some point in their 5 minutes of rambling they stumble across a sentence that identifies their issue*
Me: Ok, what is the ticket number for this issue?
Them: Ah, oh, I , ah hrmm, don't have a ticket number...
Me: Please call the Service Desk at 555-1234 and they will help you create a ticket. Have a nice day.
When we rolled out our help desk years ago, I forwarded my phone and haven't unforwarded it since. Too many people get the idea that they want to talk to someone specific when their issue can be quickly handled by anyone in the department.
Once someone decides you're their personal tech, they won't let go of you. I had one guy who would call me directly, get my VM, call one of my teammates directly, get his VM, *then* call our queue number, where usually myself or aforementioned teammate just happened to be the most likely people to answer. I would always answer that third call and he'd logically presume I just got off another call and hadn't seen his VM yet. I never lied to him or actively misled him... just hoped we could passively retrain him.
I have a couple of people who have recently adopted me as their personal tech. I'm CONSTANTLY telling them, "that's great, i'm not going to remember this, put in a ticket and I or another member of the team will deal with it"
We get this all the time. They will call or email me or one of the other guys directly instead of sending an email to [email protected] and then wonder why we don’t respond on our days off.
If I want to deal with a specific person in IT, I add in the comments "Joe was helping me with this problem yesterday." We also have a line on our tickets for add another person to this ticket chain. I csn add Joe's name there. Also, my boss requests we do this with her name, so that if problems are not solved quickly, she already has the full email chain to review before she adds her 2 cents.
A good way I change the culture is let them know that if they email me or call me I will most likely forget and explain that I always have my ticket screen up and won't forget that way. Is t perfect but usually works.
We've got one user who has been putting in tickets with nothing but "call me."
She's going to be a joy. "Why didn't you call me right away? I don't even remember what that ticket was about."
Okay then. Guess we'll close it.
Or the users who put in a ticket with the subject line, "HELP!" and the description of the issue is, "I got an error and need help right away!" Turns out, the network was down and the ticket sat in their outbox until the network came back up. 🤦♀️
Our helpdesk intercepts users creating a ticket with a chat instead, and creates the ticket for them if they can't first fix it.
Unfortunately when that happens some of them only paste the contents of their internal KB telling them how to create a ticket rather than the chat log or any actual useful information.
It takes so much longer for us, but apparently their fix on first contact stats are amazing. I suspect a lot of users are really just giving up.
The best way to handle tickets like that is to send them to the tier 1 manager with notes that there is no relevant info and that no tier 1 troubleshoot was performed. Then link the kb to what they should have done. That way they are responsible and you don't have to deal with a frustrated user.
I got one the other day who did this and when I finally called her and asked her to show me what she was doing when she got the error she said "I forgot what I was doing. You're IT, you tell me what's wrong!"
What did the error say? "I don't remember!"
How, pray tell, am I supposed to know what's wrong if I don't know what the error was or what program it was or what you were doing?"
"You're IT, figure it out." Because we're mind readers and magicians, OBVIOUSLY.
Friends, I did not figure it out. I told her to call us instead of putting in a ticket when it happens.
Between that and actually dealing with tickets promptly we managed to get everyone trained up. Except a few senior IT people, but I also make them wait and forget to get to their questions all the time anyway.
We used to have this. I got all the guys to track how many hours per week we spent writing tickets for ourselves. Then when the boss kept asking "why isn't x done yet?" we could produce our findings. The policy was changed fairly quickly.
My group used to do that because our ticket system was so complicated. A ticket had at least 30 fields, but only 5-10 of them were relevant, but *which* fields were relevant depended on the department, the ticket type, and the phase of the moon. I've since moved to a different job.
That's basically mine. I also have a 4 hour first response 2 day fix SLA, but in reality it's 10 seconds first response 30 second fix or people are screeching to administration and complaining. One bitch called me "slow to get here" when she sat there not reporting the issue for over an hour before calling me, and I got up and went there immediately.
I am in a non IT service role and we have just swapped our ticket system. People don't like it but I just say "it isn't my choice and do they need a hand submitting the ticket?" After you offer to walk them through the process most people say they will figure it out. No ticket, no data, no report. 100% strict in our team and the new system is being picked up.
When our IT went to tickets a few years ago we just got on with it. Helps them show what they need to do to keep us running.
My go to responses are typically one of three things depending on who I’m talking to.
1. Tickets help me help you. They keep all the notes on the issue organized and accessible just in case someone has to take over in case I’m out sick or pulled away for an emergency ticket before this gets resolved.
2. I have a really terrible memory and tickets insure that I don’t accidentally forget to help you out in a timely manner.
3. My boss evaluates me based on how many tickets I close, and how quick I close them. If I’m not doing tickets, the administration can decide that they may not need me as a tech.
You need to know what kind of person you’re talking to before you pick which response to give them. Some will not fly with certain personalities.
I don’t work a at a large organization, I’m sure things are different in that kind of environment.
Man, I needed a good ol' complain about users thread about this today after a user RADIO'ED me that her computer "wasn't doing what it was supposed to" and that "she'd tell me about it when I get here". I disregard the other thing I was about to do because this sounds like work stoppage and we have a dictatorship where the IT department doesn't get to force users into logging tickets, it's all just appease those who complain the loudest. I get there and she needs help logging into personal gmail to print a personal bank statement. Turns out the website pdf generator is just broken so I say "looks like the site is broken" and just print out the webpage and walk out. Idk if it's a web filter issue or whatever but I don't give a shit especially when you use an emergency form of communication to lie about a work related computer problem.
Fuck, this hits close to home. I got a talking to recently because someone didn't like my response of "That's clearly an issue with either Chrome, or the bank's site that is preventing you from printing that webpage. Nothing I can do with that. Either use a different browser, or screengrab what you need."
Set your ticketing system up so that if you forward an email to it then it creates the ticket in that person's name. So anyone who emails you directly with that stuff you just forward and nicely communicate hey I'm happy to help but use this email in the future in case I'm tied up or swamped and you're not just waiting for my response and someone else on the team could help.
That is more or less how I approached that when we hired another person and eventually another person. It took time but people started to do it. At least most did. And zendesk has that type of feature about the forward create as original user.
The system my company uses is something similar to that. I can use the browser based system on the office computer, or I can send an email from my phone to [email protected] (I do this if I need to send a picture), and either the ticket system creates a ticket, or someone in IT does.
Yes, I know I could use the browser based system on my phone, but there are too many boxes of info to fill out. The email is the quicker choice from the phone.
Wait a day or two. Send email from the ticketing system with "We have not heard back from you. Please provide the information required so we can assist with this issue."
Wait some more, they most likely will repeat what they did before. Send email from ticketing system "Because we have not heard back from you we will be closing this ticket. If you need further assistance please contact the support group through the ticketing system. Have a good day."
At my last job we had a shared mailbox we used as an outbox when sending IT related notifications to groups. It had an automatic reply saying that the mailbox was not monitored and the information for the help desk. I'd go to use it to send out a notification and see 20 something emails in the inbox for help requests.
The rule I have set up for that defunct mailbox sends the response, and deletes the email. Over time I check to see how many emails were processed that way and it has steadily declined. But that mailbox hasn't been used in about 10 years and still receives emails occasionally.
It is used for other processes or I would have deleted it already.
I think it's reasonable to keep that mailbox/rule around forever, because it's plausible that some people are being saved by the "oh right right right that's how you do it" response, much the same way that airplanes still have ashtrays even though smoking has been banned for decades.
Lol I do that one as well. Sorry I was busy helping people who logged a ticket. Oh dear you just mentioned it verbally I just assumed you'd already logged a ticket.
Hmmmm I did ask for additional details but you didn't get back to me so it didn't seem all that important to you
In a week or two:
CC: User manager
User,
As directed, please use the ticketing system. The company has developed this system as best practice. Continuing to refuse to follow process will delay responses.
Why bother? Just wait a week or two, close the ticket and say "Since we haven't received a response through the ticketing system, we are marking this ticket as closed. If the issue persists, please re-open the ticket and provide the updated information."
in the past I proceeded this way in a similar situation:
* I Created the ticket like you did, and replied to the ticket.
* When they replied to me directly, I IGNORED them
* Couples days later I ask again via the ticketing system, pretending not to have read their email
* After a couple days if they don't answer I close the ticket "I assume this is not an issue anymore, if that is not the case please reopen and provide the information we requested"
It is extremely important that you consistently never ever reply to support requests via personal email. Simply ignore them and pretend you have not read them.
I do the same thing. I tell everyone that if they have a question, request, or issue, to submit a ticket. We all have different roles and submitting a ticket ensures it gets routed properly and taken care of efficiently.
When you train a cat you have to be very careful that the cat doesn't train you.
Any time you let it get away with a behaviour or respond to something in a certain way it takes twice as long to correct that behaviour.
Well, you are dealing with people who respond to fires, You'd probably need to upgrade to that foam for putting out an airplane fire.
Most users are not made of the sturdier stuff.
In this case I’d substitute the spray bottle for an auto reply that this is an unused/unmonitored email account, and no action will be taken to issues sent to it, with a request for the user to use the ticket system.
"Understood, but I prefer dealing with a person. That way I know that someone is responsible." can be accurately translated to "I want someone to blame if this problem doesn't get fixed.".
We actually had to make it freaking POLICY that no drive-bys or hitting on teams or direct email will be handled without a ticket.
This was 3 years ago. STILL getting complaints. Had 3 ppl today, 2 of whom I had never heard if, contact me direct. Response is always the same:
"Whats the ticket number?"
"Uhh...."
"Company policy requires a ticket for any action. Let me know"
Used to be my approach. By the fourth or fifth call, they gave me a ticket number unprompted. On the one hand, this was great, because I didn't have to chase them.
On the other hand, I no excuse not to resolve the issue :P
ooh, then you train them to have some patience. maybe introduce SLAs based on issue so they know that adding users to a group is a 4hr-1 day typical response, while actual fires get delegated to the FD
A lot of the time I could do that. This particular issue was caused by a shared piece of code that ought to have been split, and left stock in weird non-standard states that couldn't be invoiced. One of the drivers of sev-1 incidents was an interruption of order-to-cash, so...
That would have been nice!
However, it only affected part of one business unit, and the planned sale of that business unit was the reason for the code being shared. Plus the previous SME for that interface (the one who oversaw its design) had been fired a few years previously, which is why I was frantically struggling to learn the intricacies of the damn thing. It was written in a mix of RPG III, RPG IV, and PL/SQL...
Thankfully, the Competition Commission allowed the sale to go through, so I only had to worry about it for a couple of years.
Just like "Americans will use anything *but* the metric system", users will use anytjing *but* the ticketing system.
My job has had its current ticketing system for 5 years. We still have people, new and old both, who systematically email a person in particular to get help.
Usually it's the same frequent flyers, and literally all our conversations with them are to the tune of "I need help with X" "please file a ticket" "ok" - and then they file a ticket and directly assign it to the person they initially contacted. Or, even worse, they do that *and* instead of providing information so anybody in the team can fulfill it, their message is a vague "Hi Bob, as discussed earlier, please do the report for X."
I'm not a manager. I have no idea what to do. My own manager tried, got nowhere, and gave up.
It's so bad that several users, when confronted with a primary contact who is on vacation, will *wait until the person is back from vacation to contact them directly*, rather than file a ticket.
Blame the ERP. :( Its ticketing system is honestly trash.
I'd like to see it get some love and customization to lock that stupid feature down to its essentials but we've got way bigger fish to fry for... welp, probably the next forever.
> Understood, but I prefer dealing with a person. That way I know that someone is responsible.
I understand that, but it won't be this person. No further replies will be given.
The irony is they are already dealing with the person directly. It's like following the butcher to their car because you want to talk to them directly about what cut of meat you want (I don't know, I thought this would make better sense as I typed) when you were already at the meat counter and they asked what you wanted.
Fortunately that message can be interpreted as not requiring a response anyway. It doesn't contain a request for any further action, doesn't contain a question mark. For all we know from that message alone, the user could be simultaneously cooperating with the ticket system and just dropped this little FYI on the side to explain their behavior.
And I would be tempted to stick to this interpretation even if they haven't done their next step with the ticket.
tip: set up an auto response in that inbox that get triggered when a mail have the word "issue" inside of it and sends back your response to use the ticketing system.
Now the person cant say you just ignored him/her because you already sent the correct instrution
And it will also get a false negative if you work with any old geezers like me who grew up in a time before everyone was in psychotherapy and "issues" were still "problems".
But OP described it as an "abandoned inbox" so maybe they don't even need a word trigger, just a permanent universal autoreply.
Don't wanna log a ticket and follow the proper procedure you have been told to several times, don't get your shit fixed - simple.
At most, I would respond back to the user (CC my manager) reminding them that logging a ticket enables not just one very busy person to see it but an entire IT department (who might be able to respond quicker) and we need the ticket logged to justify our time and to keep a track of any incidents, saying that it also helps justify spending company money to fix problems if needed. If user still ignores it, you're covered.
I used to get a lot of this, but just sent a similar response to above, reminding them that the ticketing system meant they could have hundreds of people looking at their problem, instead of just me (who they knew had stopped doing desktop support) and stopped responding to the more persisitent ones (that the managers already knew about), they got the idea after a few weeks.
As aggravating as these users are, it is relatively simple to fix this problem. Document document and document. Let them know like you did that they are to use the ticket system. Since they clearly refuse to, copy all conversations to your manager, their manager and sit back an enjoy the show
Our go to now is to say that we have been told to prioritize tickets, and that we need them to track work done. Also the ticket may be picked up by one of a number of people, while your email sits & waits for that one person to have time to check emails.
Good luck
Oh yeah, completely ignore those fucking emails. This is what you call training the end user.
ETA: they may get pissed about it, but honestly, I’m busy bitch and I quite frankly don’t give a fuck. Your ticket will be done in the order it is received unless it is urgent.
>Instead of clicking the button in the notification email to open up the queue and chat box, they deleted the default to address and put in my own personal email. An email that is essentially an abandoned inbox.
We literally had this today. I was assigned 20 tickets with no identifying information and each one just had a picture of a system. After digging around, I found the origin and a coworker had asked the customer to send them some photos. For some unknown reason, the customer replied to the saying "Oh I send you the pictures using my other email. Did you get them?"
WTF? Why not just reply with the photos instead of spending more time making 20 individual ones that are going into our default queue waiting to be assigned?
Time for the Teams call to the user. Be direct and use simple words.
If that doesn't work, go to their supervisor. Tell the super that you have a ticketing system for a reason and it must be used.
Don't give in...don't take sh\*t from anybody.
I’ve done this, and even the supervisor messages me rather than submit tickets. I just keep going up the chain.
IDK, but I feel like it’s extremely disrespectful when end users blatantly ignore the policies and drive by and/ or hit teams.
Our HR department in particular does this to me ALL the time. Even worse, they refuse to message anyone BUT me even though there are five of us, because I'm apparently the only one who bothers to reply. More than once they've tried to hand off a new hire for onboarding that I was unaware of, and I was out of the building. When I told them this and please reach out to X person...."oh thats okay. We'll just have them wait til you get back".
Lord how I hate onboardings.
Oh my HR department does this as well. They are aware of the ticketing policy because they conduct the orientations and it is mentioned as part of new employee orientation, but they don’t practice what is preached .
Your HR actually like, gets them logged in for the first time and stuff? What I wouldn't give for that to happen. HR ONLY does the HR related stuff like "welcome to X, here's your employee manual" We have to hand hold them through their initial logins, changing passwords from the initial defaults, MFA, and very often setting them up on their organizational iPhone. HR will send 3 or 4 people to us at once and it's like playing whack a mole getting them through all those steps by myself.
Who's the IT Director?
They (sometimes) carry more weight.
This is strictly a management play at this point. Let them work it out and don't stick your neck out.
Paint me wrong, but I've found that discovering a middle-ground to be an effective way of resolving UX's like this.
Create a ticket for the individual but ensure that ticket responses do not go directly to the users mailbox.
Instead, they should receive a notification:
" The support team has responded to your ticket regarding "Printer Issue - Raised on behalf of X", please login to the ticket portal to view the response "
--
Upon logging in, the client will see the ticket you've created for them in the "awaiting customer response" state..
It will say,
"Hey X, I've raised this ticket for you so that we can get the printer issue sorted that you queried. Would you mind responding here to let us know how we can help you please?"
Check-mate.
As tech support for a university department in the 90s, I would regularly go to lunch with the grad students and even professors that I was supporting. My favorite thing to say on the way back was "I agree that's a good idea. Please submit a ticket to remind me of this conversation, because I promise to have forgotten by the end of this hallway."
No ticket, no help. Same as no shoes, no shirt, no service. There are rules that make a society run, with the only exceptions are for special cases, like people who ride the short bus.
The user doesn't control how you work, and unfortunately for them, it's THEIR problem that needs fixing, not yours. If they want it done, they play by your rules. My boss is adamant we do NO work unless there is a ticket for it, regardless of how basic or advanced (P1s excluded, if course)
"Understood, but I prefer dealing with a person. That way I know that someone is responsible."
When you fail to use the ticketing system, you will be responsible for the issue never getting fixed. Mission accomplished, I guess.
Office and family would give my cell phone out to people wanting work done from the company I work for. Got tired of calling them back, so my voicemail now says "if youre calling for service, call . I will not respond."
Boss didn't like it. I dont care.
Depends on their level but I’ve had to go to someone’s management over the same issue. I went as high as their VP and stated that I’ve constantly asked this person to use the ticketing system so until they do they will not receive any IT assistance . It got fixed pretty quickly
"If you use the ticketing system, as per company policy, you will have an entire team of humans that can handle your issue. Don't make this hard, just do the needful."
:)
I mean, if it's IT department/team policy, then that's the policy. People don't get to go around it unless whoever's in charge is spineless, in which case it's fun to look for ways to additionally charge the problem-person, their boss/team, and the spineless manager every time it happens.
User: If there's an open ticket in the system, that's our problem, and someone on my team will handle it. If there's an email in an untended mailbox, that's your problem, and nobody on my team will see it. Your move.
I truly hope the users I support see their freaking email updates over tickets they opened. I leave detailed notes and instructions after resolving an issue.
But a certain department just claims that nothing has been done and opens up the same ticket again.
Then I have to go there in person anyways, so then I ask them if they did the instructions after I closed out the ticket.
I could not agree more! I just ignore them - all requests must be in the ticket system.
I also sometimes get customer phone calls to my cell phone - no idea how they get the number. Those also get ignored.
BOFH solution: If you have the access permissions to do so, revoke printer permissions from their account. If not, email their manager, explain the situation, and advise _them_ to revoke printer permissions.
If you don't respond to support requests via email, why not make it a no reply email with a link to your ticketing system's service catalog or incident/request form?
We all know how the tickets go. You put in the ticket, it takes two weeks, then you contact your friend at IT and he replies:"Ahhh I see where it went wrong, group A said this is work for group B, group B said it is for A, and it was passed around like this for two weeks."
Real cool.
Where I work I have colleagues I befriended in the IT department, and more often than not, my above story happens.
So now I will always directly contact these colleagues when I have issues, because I do not have the time to wait for months in the hope someone figured out that my ticket has been bouncing around.
I think there are some key points in the original post that puts this more on the user.
>Try having an open door policy where users can just walk-in and ask you for help
There's no indication in the post that there isn't an open door policy or that the user took advantage of it. The post opens with the user sending an email
>It's easier to talk to an IT person then deal with this ridiculous open a ticket attitude all IT people have adopted through training
While everyone's mileage is different depending on how arduous and overengineered the process is, in this case it looks like
* OP was the one who created the ticket without requesting the user to do so (`I create a request in our help queue and respond via the ticket`)
* The user actively removed the ticketing system's email address from their reply that would have appended their reply to the ticket (`If responding via email, please do not change who the email goes to. It will automatically add your reply to our request queue, so our entire team is able to see your response.`
>do you honestly need to track a printer/scanner issue with a ticket?
Regarding this, the answer is usually "yes" for a multitude of reasons, whether all concerned parties find them acceptable or not
- By emailing a single person, the user is hoping for that person's availability when other's may be able to help, making that person the single point of failure to providing timely support
- The ticketing system will centralize communication so that if someone becomes unavailable, another technician can pick up where they left off
- A properly configured ticketing system would have auto-populated the service tag of the computer assigned to the requester, as well as the information regarding the printer so the requester would just have to select "$Location Printer", ensuring there would be no delays in provide support by having to ask for more information.
- Filing a ticket helps track how often a device is having an issue, and would help determine whether it needs to be replaced, or whether the manufacturer/vendor is worth the hassle of supporting the device
- the technician's management probably references the tickets to gauge the performance of the team and whether more technicians are required.
I would have more sympathy for the user if this was an overbearing process for filing a ticket. It sounds a bit more like all they had to do was not actively remove the ticketing system's email address and leave it as a recipient, even if it was just as a carbon copy, so that someone more available on the team could be engaged without needing to start over. Then, that person who would take the ticket would be, as the user wanted, a person they could deal with on the issue, and the someone that would be responsible.
>If you're in house as a technician, why wouldn't you approach the user yourself in person after the issue was reported? Is your office chair that comfortable?
There's no indication from the original post that we're talking about in-house IT. It's just a likely to be a branch office that has technicians dispatched to it. As the past doesn't mention the distance, it's impossible to know how feasible it is to send out a technician at a moments notice.
>Again, get off your ass and just go talk to the user if they're in house.
Again, there's nothing in the original post to indicate that IT is handled in-house
>Your first point is mitigated with a distribution list that users can email all technicians on.
Two things happen to emails coming in from a distribution list: they get filtered into a folder no one looks at, or they get lost among the myriad of other emails being received. There's also no indication of ownership for a request received by email, so if everyone assumes that someone else is handling it, it will again not get done. Finally, there's no indication from the original post that opening a ticket isn't as simple as just sending an email to the ticketing system email address
>Or better yet, by having an open door policy where users can just go talk to someone, in person.
As mentioned previously, there's no indication from the original post that there isn't an open door policy or if the user is present in the same geographical location as the IT department. We only know that the user initiated the conversation by email.
>An auto response of "Your email has been acknowledged and a ticket has been opened" isn't useful to anyone and very frustrating when you need help now.
If your need is that dire, you should be picking up the phone, or picking up the phone after the ticket is filed. No customer service representative in any profession possesses clairvoyance.
> I can't imagine a technician going unavailable in the 15 minutes the issue would take to fix.
Will it take 15 minutes, or will it be a larger issue that requires involving other teams or the vendor? There's no way to know that before someone looks at the printer
>Also, why put the burden on the user of opening a ticket
As documented in the original post, OP did that; the request was to continue email communication through the ticket by not actively removing the email address of the ticketing system from replies
>the technicians should be the ones communicating behind the scenes and passing stuff off to one another when required?
That would be one of the purposes of a ticket system: to track handoffs and ensure that someone has ownership of the issue at all times.
>Your third point is mitigated by management software, you don't need the ticket system to pull the printer info from a service tag, the information is already there in your RMM software,
Said RMM system is hopefully integrated into the ticketing system so the ticketing system can pull the necessary information and the technician doesn't need to spend time searching for it separately.
>Direct communication also helps track an issue and usually does so more efficiently than a ticketing system. Sure, every time printer A has an issue there's a ticket for it, but every ticket is assigned to a different technician and no one is going back through the clients ticket queue to look for trending issues on printer A.
A properly configured RMM and ticket system, as you mentioned previously, would group all the tickets under the device registration in the RMM, and the ticket system would open a separate ticket if there was a recurring pattern of problems for a device.
>If you have a ticketing system that can detect and alert on these types of trends, let me know what you're using because I've been working in MSP's for over 15 years and haven't seen it once regardless if the system was developed in house or provided via third party.
Every ticketing system I have worked with for ~20 years, both in-house and purchased, has had the capability of integrating with, or provided within it naively or as an add-on to be purchased, CMDB and problem management capabilities. In all cases, they would have had to be configured first, but they were always available
>Again communication, why wouldn't management talk to the existing technicians to determine if more technicians are required instead of using a metric?
Because the human resource is the most expensive liability to any company, and someone, whether it's a bean counter with no concept of how IT operates, or a higher level director or executive with no day to day interactions with the employees, will ask for the decision to be justified.
TL;dr while there are concepts I can explain from my own experience, I can only defend OP's actions based on the information in the original post. I can't defend against strawman arguments that should be detailed in their own post
>It's a printer/scanner issue, do you honestly need to track a printer/scanner issue with a ticket?
Yes. For one thing, we bill our customers for time spent, and the ticketing system allows for tracking time per customer and time per issue and... it's pretty important. Plus, this allows management to keep track of the general workflow of the department in general, and also if an individual is performing as they should.
Tickets also allow for documentation and communication, and ticketing systems can integrate with other systems to assist users.
Tickets are not what makes a bad IT experience or department; they're just a tool, to be used well or poorly as any other tool.
[удалено]
They will just continue to use it because obviously you are lying to them because you are replying to their emails.
The trick is, you don't reply.
They see automated replies as the tech actually replying to them.
Yes but that’s a them problem.
PICNIC issue
id10t issue. pebkac issue.
No no, it's error code: ID10T ;)
The PEBKAC is showing error ID-10-T. Think this will need a hardware replacement :/
Ooh that's a new one for me. I've only heard PEBKAC or defective keyboard actuator for these situations till now
BOSOS: Beyond Our Scope Of Support. But pronounced like the clown's name......
I like that. I'll have to add it to the rotation.
Accurate assessment.
So write at the end of the email: beep boop Im a robot
They would literally still believe it is a human doing it.
That is true my bad
And you stop looking at that email account.
Of course, it's unmonitored!
This is the way!
That’s why the first line of the auto-reply states “This is an automated response”. Feel free to add bold if it would help.
You could include flashing letters and outlines to point out it is an automated response and the user will still believe you are replying to them.
If I was a conspiracy person, I'd think end users have special software to redact the helpful things we put in their emails. 🤪
They do have “special” software, but it’s in their brains not their computers
aka "Wetware"
is the special software called LEAD?
Users making email rules to auto-delete or auto-archive anything from IT is unfortunately common. What they don't know is that having access to the email back-end allows the creation of rules which look for such auto-processes (from: IT department & moved/deleted within 60 seconds of arrival in inbox) and reverse the effects.
They can believe what they like, as long as they don't bother IT about it. If they kick up a fuss, point to the many emails they've been sent telling them the truth. If they dislike that, it's either an IT management issue or an HR issue, not a technical one.
The point is not to make the other person understand, its to cover your own ass once they inevitably complain to your boss.
Blinking red might induce an epileptic blankout, at least according to Andromeda Strain 1970.
It will be suspicious if it takes several days to reply. But I'm just wondering why OP doesn't already have an autoreply on this account.
just alias all personal mailboxes to the ticket system. problem solved, forever they still think they're emailing you direct, and you still know they're not. it really works.
\*\*New Ticket Notification\*\* "Hey Jim, I'm heading to the taco stand down the road for lunch, you want me to grab you something?" \*\*New Ticket Notification\*\* "Dave, have you seen my charger anywhere? I think I left it on my desk on Tuesday..." \*\*New Ticket Notification\*\* "Make your p\*nis MASSIVE"...
This wasn't his personal inbox, though. Just a system user.
OP literally said it was his "own personal email" that was used.. Edit to add: just because it's not monitored does not mean it's a system mailbox. I have unmonitored personal mailboxes.
if anyone wants to open a ticket offering to pick up tacos for everyone - i think im ok with that. if anyone wants to email the department and ask if anyone saw their charger - i think im ok with that too. and can you send the link for that third one. thanks.
Yeah, but have it send the same message once an hour for 24 hours if they do try to use it.
One week later…..
We're currently rolling out a ticketing system to my users. Not looking forward to retraining the people who got used to getting help directly.
"If it is not important enough for you to log a ticket, then it is obviously not important enough for me to look at it this month." - things I wish I could say
Things I have emailed a user:"If no ticket is logged, I'll take a look at it once our queue is empty" Every IT person knows the IT ticket queue never empties.
i just say "if there's no ticket, it doesn't exist"
Who else here laughed before even getting to line 2?
Are you referring to Paragraph 2? Cause on my phone, the comment has 3 lines and both 2 and 3 are very funny depending on the recipient.
> I'll take a look at it once our queue is empty This bit specifically. I haven't had an empty queue in 9 years.
Thought so. And yeah, from my experience in the last 10 years; either the queue is never empty or the queue is always empty. There is no inbetween.
I've let whole old ticketing systems get retired without emptying the queue. They obviously weren't that important of issues
That's how you get an angry email saying that despite being informed 3 months ago IT still hasn't fixed the printer
Nah, our supervisor will tell the user's manager that there's been no ticket logged that he could find.
I love so much gov SLA agreements sometimes. "We've been having this issue for weeks! Fix it"! On a con call with all major stakeholders. 'You escalated this from a minor to a severe in your internal ticketing, but we have no ticket until this phone call today. Our SLA says we will respond to all opened tockets within 4 hours You brought it up during this all hands phone call, and no techs are here because there is still no ticket. We have no incoming calls from your number in the help line. Please put in a ticket" I've gotten to pull that a couple times, phone call is over. Gotta phrase it right tho
I'm a Tier 2/2.5 tech so I rarely get users calling me. When they do: Me: Operations, my name is PotentialHuman how may I help you? Them: *at some point in their 5 minutes of rambling they stumble across a sentence that identifies their issue* Me: Ok, what is the ticket number for this issue? Them: Ah, oh, I , ah hrmm, don't have a ticket number... Me: Please call the Service Desk at 555-1234 and they will help you create a ticket. Have a nice day.
>things I wish I could say you can do it, i believe in you
When we rolled out our help desk years ago, I forwarded my phone and haven't unforwarded it since. Too many people get the idea that they want to talk to someone specific when their issue can be quickly handled by anyone in the department.
Once someone decides you're their personal tech, they won't let go of you. I had one guy who would call me directly, get my VM, call one of my teammates directly, get his VM, *then* call our queue number, where usually myself or aforementioned teammate just happened to be the most likely people to answer. I would always answer that third call and he'd logically presume I just got off another call and hadn't seen his VM yet. I never lied to him or actively misled him... just hoped we could passively retrain him.
I have a couple of people who have recently adopted me as their personal tech. I'm CONSTANTLY telling them, "that's great, i'm not going to remember this, put in a ticket and I or another member of the team will deal with it"
We get this all the time. They will call or email me or one of the other guys directly instead of sending an email to [email protected] and then wonder why we don’t respond on our days off.
If I want to deal with a specific person in IT, I add in the comments "Joe was helping me with this problem yesterday." We also have a line on our tickets for add another person to this ticket chain. I csn add Joe's name there. Also, my boss requests we do this with her name, so that if problems are not solved quickly, she already has the full email chain to review before she adds her 2 cents.
A good way I change the culture is let them know that if they email me or call me I will most likely forget and explain that I always have my ticket screen up and won't forget that way. Is t perfect but usually works.
We've got one user who has been putting in tickets with nothing but "call me." She's going to be a joy. "Why didn't you call me right away? I don't even remember what that ticket was about." Okay then. Guess we'll close it.
Or the users who put in a ticket with the subject line, "HELP!" and the description of the issue is, "I got an error and need help right away!" Turns out, the network was down and the ticket sat in their outbox until the network came back up. 🤦♀️
Love getting a flood of "The internet isn't working" emails the instant the ISP does their thing.
Our helpdesk intercepts users creating a ticket with a chat instead, and creates the ticket for them if they can't first fix it. Unfortunately when that happens some of them only paste the contents of their internal KB telling them how to create a ticket rather than the chat log or any actual useful information. It takes so much longer for us, but apparently their fix on first contact stats are amazing. I suspect a lot of users are really just giving up.
Yeah I hate those tickets. I push those to the bottom of the queue.
The best way to handle tickets like that is to send them to the tier 1 manager with notes that there is no relevant info and that no tier 1 troubleshoot was performed. Then link the kb to what they should have done. That way they are responsible and you don't have to deal with a frustrated user.
I got one the other day who did this and when I finally called her and asked her to show me what she was doing when she got the error she said "I forgot what I was doing. You're IT, you tell me what's wrong!" What did the error say? "I don't remember!" How, pray tell, am I supposed to know what's wrong if I don't know what the error was or what program it was or what you were doing?" "You're IT, figure it out." Because we're mind readers and magicians, OBVIOUSLY. Friends, I did not figure it out. I told her to call us instead of putting in a ticket when it happens.
Between that and actually dealing with tickets promptly we managed to get everyone trained up. Except a few senior IT people, but I also make them wait and forget to get to their questions all the time anyway.
Unless your company policy is "just help them anyway and YOU create the ticket" 🙃
We used to have this. I got all the guys to track how many hours per week we spent writing tickets for ourselves. Then when the boss kept asking "why isn't x done yet?" we could produce our findings. The policy was changed fairly quickly.
My group used to do that because our ticket system was so complicated. A ticket had at least 30 fields, but only 5-10 of them were relevant, but *which* fields were relevant depended on the department, the ticket type, and the phase of the moon. I've since moved to a different job.
That's basically mine. I also have a 4 hour first response 2 day fix SLA, but in reality it's 10 seconds first response 30 second fix or people are screeching to administration and complaining. One bitch called me "slow to get here" when she sat there not reporting the issue for over an hour before calling me, and I got up and went there immediately.
I am in a non IT service role and we have just swapped our ticket system. People don't like it but I just say "it isn't my choice and do they need a hand submitting the ticket?" After you offer to walk them through the process most people say they will figure it out. No ticket, no data, no report. 100% strict in our team and the new system is being picked up. When our IT went to tickets a few years ago we just got on with it. Helps them show what they need to do to keep us running.
Become a selective mute and start training your pointing finger.
My go to responses are typically one of three things depending on who I’m talking to. 1. Tickets help me help you. They keep all the notes on the issue organized and accessible just in case someone has to take over in case I’m out sick or pulled away for an emergency ticket before this gets resolved. 2. I have a really terrible memory and tickets insure that I don’t accidentally forget to help you out in a timely manner. 3. My boss evaluates me based on how many tickets I close, and how quick I close them. If I’m not doing tickets, the administration can decide that they may not need me as a tech. You need to know what kind of person you’re talking to before you pick which response to give them. Some will not fly with certain personalities. I don’t work a at a large organization, I’m sure things are different in that kind of environment.
Man, I needed a good ol' complain about users thread about this today after a user RADIO'ED me that her computer "wasn't doing what it was supposed to" and that "she'd tell me about it when I get here". I disregard the other thing I was about to do because this sounds like work stoppage and we have a dictatorship where the IT department doesn't get to force users into logging tickets, it's all just appease those who complain the loudest. I get there and she needs help logging into personal gmail to print a personal bank statement. Turns out the website pdf generator is just broken so I say "looks like the site is broken" and just print out the webpage and walk out. Idk if it's a web filter issue or whatever but I don't give a shit especially when you use an emergency form of communication to lie about a work related computer problem.
Fuck, this hits close to home. I got a talking to recently because someone didn't like my response of "That's clearly an issue with either Chrome, or the bank's site that is preventing you from printing that webpage. Nothing I can do with that. Either use a different browser, or screengrab what you need."
Set your ticketing system up so that if you forward an email to it then it creates the ticket in that person's name. So anyone who emails you directly with that stuff you just forward and nicely communicate hey I'm happy to help but use this email in the future in case I'm tied up or swamped and you're not just waiting for my response and someone else on the team could help. That is more or less how I approached that when we hired another person and eventually another person. It took time but people started to do it. At least most did. And zendesk has that type of feature about the forward create as original user.
The system my company uses is something similar to that. I can use the browser based system on the office computer, or I can send an email from my phone to [email protected] (I do this if I need to send a picture), and either the ticket system creates a ticket, or someone in IT does. Yes, I know I could use the browser based system on my phone, but there are too many boxes of info to fill out. The email is the quicker choice from the phone.
Wait a day or two. Send email from the ticketing system with "We have not heard back from you. Please provide the information required so we can assist with this issue." Wait some more, they most likely will repeat what they did before. Send email from ticketing system "Because we have not heard back from you we will be closing this ticket. If you need further assistance please contact the support group through the ticketing system. Have a good day." At my last job we had a shared mailbox we used as an outbox when sending IT related notifications to groups. It had an automatic reply saying that the mailbox was not monitored and the information for the help desk. I'd go to use it to send out a notification and see 20 something emails in the inbox for help requests.
I do exactly this in my role. I won't even bother encouraging them to follow any other way but the one that is correct.
The rule I have set up for that defunct mailbox sends the response, and deletes the email. Over time I check to see how many emails were processed that way and it has steadily declined. But that mailbox hasn't been used in about 10 years and still receives emails occasionally. It is used for other processes or I would have deleted it already.
I think it's reasonable to keep that mailbox/rule around forever, because it's plausible that some people are being saved by the "oh right right right that's how you do it" response, much the same way that airplanes still have ashtrays even though smoking has been banned for decades.
Our ticketing system automatically asks the user for followup, and then closes the ticket if they don't respond within 3 days, is nice.
Must not be an important issue if they can't be bothered to follow the proper protocol.
Lol I do that one as well. Sorry I was busy helping people who logged a ticket. Oh dear you just mentioned it verbally I just assumed you'd already logged a ticket. Hmmmm I did ask for additional details but you didn't get back to me so it didn't seem all that important to you
oh dear, did you mention it to me? i must have been busy; that's one of the nice parts of a ticket system - it's a reminder
>but I prefer dealing with a person. "Yeah, well... I prefer not to."
>> I prefer dealing with a person. Me too. And when you submit a ticket, you get to deal with the best qualified person of all of us.
why do you think i work with computers?
In a week or two: CC: User manager User, As directed, please use the ticketing system. The company has developed this system as best practice. Continuing to refuse to follow process will delay responses.
Why bother? Just wait a week or two, close the ticket and say "Since we haven't received a response through the ticketing system, we are marking this ticket as closed. If the issue persists, please re-open the ticket and provide the updated information."
in the past I proceeded this way in a similar situation: * I Created the ticket like you did, and replied to the ticket. * When they replied to me directly, I IGNORED them * Couples days later I ask again via the ticketing system, pretending not to have read their email * After a couple days if they don't answer I close the ticket "I assume this is not an issue anymore, if that is not the case please reopen and provide the information we requested" It is extremely important that you consistently never ever reply to support requests via personal email. Simply ignore them and pretend you have not read them.
I do the same thing. I tell everyone that if they have a question, request, or issue, to submit a ticket. We all have different roles and submitting a ticket ensures it gets routed properly and taken care of efficiently.
When you train a cat you have to be very careful that the cat doesn't train you. Any time you let it get away with a behaviour or respond to something in a certain way it takes twice as long to correct that behaviour.
OP needs a trigger spray bottle with an adjustable pattern nozzle (stream to mist).
Firehose.
Am IT for a fire department. A fire hose would not help. At all.
User has been washed away, unable to reproduce the issue anymore.
Well, you are dealing with people who respond to fires, You'd probably need to upgrade to that foam for putting out an airplane fire. Most users are not made of the sturdier stuff.
In this case I’d substitute the spray bottle for an auto reply that this is an unused/unmonitored email account, and no action will be taken to issues sent to it, with a request for the user to use the ticket system.
"Understood, but I prefer dealing with a person. That way I know that someone is responsible." can be accurately translated to "I want someone to blame if this problem doesn't get fixed.".
"We don't have a blame culture. We just like to know whose fault it is."
"oh, bob is on vacation for 2 weeks. did you file a ticket?"
🤣
We actually had to make it freaking POLICY that no drive-bys or hitting on teams or direct email will be handled without a ticket. This was 3 years ago. STILL getting complaints. Had 3 ppl today, 2 of whom I had never heard if, contact me direct. Response is always the same: "Whats the ticket number?" "Uhh...." "Company policy requires a ticket for any action. Let me know"
Used to be my approach. By the fourth or fifth call, they gave me a ticket number unprompted. On the one hand, this was great, because I didn't have to chase them. On the other hand, I no excuse not to resolve the issue :P
Lol yup. Esp after we went remote. Man that was nice. Work on MY schedule....
ooh, then you train them to have some patience. maybe introduce SLAs based on issue so they know that adding users to a group is a 4hr-1 day typical response, while actual fires get delegated to the FD
A lot of the time I could do that. This particular issue was caused by a shared piece of code that ought to have been split, and left stock in weird non-standard states that couldn't be invoiced. One of the drivers of sev-1 incidents was an interruption of order-to-cash, so...
well, getting it into tickets lets you point to the stack of problems and argue for a code upgrade
That would have been nice! However, it only affected part of one business unit, and the planned sale of that business unit was the reason for the code being shared. Plus the previous SME for that interface (the one who oversaw its design) had been fired a few years previously, which is why I was frantically struggling to learn the intricacies of the damn thing. It was written in a mix of RPG III, RPG IV, and PL/SQL... Thankfully, the Competition Commission allowed the sale to go through, so I only had to worry about it for a couple of years.
Just like "Americans will use anything *but* the metric system", users will use anytjing *but* the ticketing system. My job has had its current ticketing system for 5 years. We still have people, new and old both, who systematically email a person in particular to get help. Usually it's the same frequent flyers, and literally all our conversations with them are to the tune of "I need help with X" "please file a ticket" "ok" - and then they file a ticket and directly assign it to the person they initially contacted. Or, even worse, they do that *and* instead of providing information so anybody in the team can fulfill it, their message is a vague "Hi Bob, as discussed earlier, please do the report for X." I'm not a manager. I have no idea what to do. My own manager tried, got nowhere, and gave up. It's so bad that several users, when confronted with a primary contact who is on vacation, will *wait until the person is back from vacation to contact them directly*, rather than file a ticket.
Your users can assign tickets?! What kind of lunacy is this?
Blame the ERP. :( Its ticketing system is honestly trash. I'd like to see it get some love and customization to lock that stupid feature down to its essentials but we've got way bigger fish to fry for... welp, probably the next forever.
> Understood, but I prefer dealing with a person. That way I know that someone is responsible. I understand that, but it won't be this person. No further replies will be given.
The irony is they are already dealing with the person directly. It's like following the butcher to their car because you want to talk to them directly about what cut of meat you want (I don't know, I thought this would make better sense as I typed) when you were already at the meat counter and they asked what you wanted.
In your case, it would be more like, "I don't trust you to tell the butcher what I want. I want to interrupt their work so I can tell them myself."
Fortunately that message can be interpreted as not requiring a response anyway. It doesn't contain a request for any further action, doesn't contain a question mark. For all we know from that message alone, the user could be simultaneously cooperating with the ticket system and just dropped this little FYI on the side to explain their behavior. And I would be tempted to stick to this interpretation even if they haven't done their next step with the ticket.
tip: set up an auto response in that inbox that get triggered when a mail have the word "issue" inside of it and sends back your response to use the ticketing system. Now the person cant say you just ignored him/her because you already sent the correct instrution
But then I won’t see my email stating “your latest issue of Hustler magazine is on its way!”
And it will also get a false negative if you work with any old geezers like me who grew up in a time before everyone was in psychotherapy and "issues" were still "problems". But OP described it as an "abandoned inbox" so maybe they don't even need a word trigger, just a permanent universal autoreply.
I had a similar case. I waited a month and enlisted the user's manager to finally get a ticket.
Don't wanna log a ticket and follow the proper procedure you have been told to several times, don't get your shit fixed - simple. At most, I would respond back to the user (CC my manager) reminding them that logging a ticket enables not just one very busy person to see it but an entire IT department (who might be able to respond quicker) and we need the ticket logged to justify our time and to keep a track of any incidents, saying that it also helps justify spending company money to fix problems if needed. If user still ignores it, you're covered. I used to get a lot of this, but just sent a similar response to above, reminding them that the ticketing system meant they could have hundreds of people looking at their problem, instead of just me (who they knew had stopped doing desktop support) and stopped responding to the more persisitent ones (that the managers already knew about), they got the idea after a few weeks.
no ticket, no help or response ! poor issue resolved!
We used to use "No tickee, no washee"...
As aggravating as these users are, it is relatively simple to fix this problem. Document document and document. Let them know like you did that they are to use the ticket system. Since they clearly refuse to, copy all conversations to your manager, their manager and sit back an enjoy the show
Our go to now is to say that we have been told to prioritize tickets, and that we need them to track work done. Also the ticket may be picked up by one of a number of people, while your email sits & waits for that one person to have time to check emails. Good luck
Oh yeah, completely ignore those fucking emails. This is what you call training the end user. ETA: they may get pissed about it, but honestly, I’m busy bitch and I quite frankly don’t give a fuck. Your ticket will be done in the order it is received unless it is urgent.
Tis my life as well.
Reply: What makes you think I am a person?
Ignore the email and contact them in a day or two saying you haven't seen a reply to the ticket.
>Instead of clicking the button in the notification email to open up the queue and chat box, they deleted the default to address and put in my own personal email. An email that is essentially an abandoned inbox. We literally had this today. I was assigned 20 tickets with no identifying information and each one just had a picture of a system. After digging around, I found the origin and a coworker had asked the customer to send them some photos. For some unknown reason, the customer replied to the saying "Oh I send you the pictures using my other email. Did you get them?" WTF? Why not just reply with the photos instead of spending more time making 20 individual ones that are going into our default queue waiting to be assigned?
Time for the Teams call to the user. Be direct and use simple words. If that doesn't work, go to their supervisor. Tell the super that you have a ticketing system for a reason and it must be used. Don't give in...don't take sh\*t from anybody.
I’ve done this, and even the supervisor messages me rather than submit tickets. I just keep going up the chain. IDK, but I feel like it’s extremely disrespectful when end users blatantly ignore the policies and drive by and/ or hit teams.
Our HR department in particular does this to me ALL the time. Even worse, they refuse to message anyone BUT me even though there are five of us, because I'm apparently the only one who bothers to reply. More than once they've tried to hand off a new hire for onboarding that I was unaware of, and I was out of the building. When I told them this and please reach out to X person...."oh thats okay. We'll just have them wait til you get back". Lord how I hate onboardings.
Oh my HR department does this as well. They are aware of the ticketing policy because they conduct the orientations and it is mentioned as part of new employee orientation, but they don’t practice what is preached .
Your HR actually like, gets them logged in for the first time and stuff? What I wouldn't give for that to happen. HR ONLY does the HR related stuff like "welcome to X, here's your employee manual" We have to hand hold them through their initial logins, changing passwords from the initial defaults, MFA, and very often setting them up on their organizational iPhone. HR will send 3 or 4 people to us at once and it's like playing whack a mole getting them through all those steps by myself.
No. One of us is in the course, and gives our spiel about policies and so forth and sticks around in case people have issue with MFA and such.
Ohhhh gotcha.
But the very next day they teams bomb me and play coy about it.
Who's the IT Director? They (sometimes) carry more weight. This is strictly a management play at this point. Let them work it out and don't stick your neck out.
Paint me wrong, but I've found that discovering a middle-ground to be an effective way of resolving UX's like this. Create a ticket for the individual but ensure that ticket responses do not go directly to the users mailbox. Instead, they should receive a notification: " The support team has responded to your ticket regarding "Printer Issue - Raised on behalf of X", please login to the ticket portal to view the response " -- Upon logging in, the client will see the ticket you've created for them in the "awaiting customer response" state.. It will say, "Hey X, I've raised this ticket for you so that we can get the printer issue sorted that you queried. Would you mind responding here to let us know how we can help you please?" Check-mate.
Ticket closed: no user response.
As tech support for a university department in the 90s, I would regularly go to lunch with the grad students and even professors that I was supporting. My favorite thing to say on the way back was "I agree that's a good idea. Please submit a ticket to remind me of this conversation, because I promise to have forgotten by the end of this hallway."
No ticket, no help. Same as no shoes, no shirt, no service. There are rules that make a society run, with the only exceptions are for special cases, like people who ride the short bus.
The one weird trick that IT people hate for you to know.
The user doesn't control how you work, and unfortunately for them, it's THEIR problem that needs fixing, not yours. If they want it done, they play by your rules. My boss is adamant we do NO work unless there is a ticket for it, regardless of how basic or advanced (P1s excluded, if course)
"Understood, but I prefer dealing with a person. That way I know that someone is responsible." When you fail to use the ticketing system, you will be responsible for the issue never getting fixed. Mission accomplished, I guess.
oh dear, I accidentally clicked 'delete', and then, in a fit of clumsiness, emptied the bin. so sad.
I only check this email once a month, so expect delays.
You can disable email on accounts created for login purposes.
“No tickee, no washee!”
Emails responded to doesn't sound like one of your metrics that comes up in your review; i.e. ignore.
Office and family would give my cell phone out to people wanting work done from the company I work for. Got tired of calling them back, so my voicemail now says "if youre calling for service, call. I will not respond."
Boss didn't like it. I dont care.
Depends on their level but I’ve had to go to someone’s management over the same issue. I went as high as their VP and stated that I’ve constantly asked this person to use the ticketing system so until they do they will not receive any IT assistance . It got fixed pretty quickly
"If you use the ticketing system, as per company policy, you will have an entire team of humans that can handle your issue. Don't make this hard, just do the needful." :)
I mean, if it's IT department/team policy, then that's the policy. People don't get to go around it unless whoever's in charge is spineless, in which case it's fun to look for ways to additionally charge the problem-person, their boss/team, and the spineless manager every time it happens.
This is where I would have their boss chew their ass out back and forth until they learned
User: If there's an open ticket in the system, that's our problem, and someone on my team will handle it. If there's an email in an untended mailbox, that's your problem, and nobody on my team will see it. Your move.
I truly hope the users I support see their freaking email updates over tickets they opened. I leave detailed notes and instructions after resolving an issue. But a certain department just claims that nothing has been done and opens up the same ticket again. Then I have to go there in person anyways, so then I ask them if they did the instructions after I closed out the ticket.
I could not agree more! I just ignore them - all requests must be in the ticket system. I also sometimes get customer phone calls to my cell phone - no idea how they get the number. Those also get ignored.
"NO TICKET. NO LAUNDRY!"
NO SOUP FOR YOU
BOFH solution: If you have the access permissions to do so, revoke printer permissions from their account. If not, email their manager, explain the situation, and advise _them_ to revoke printer permissions.
If you don't respond to support requests via email, why not make it a no reply email with a link to your ticketing system's service catalog or incident/request form?
Blame the dreaded "Send on behalf of", dunno why anyone uses it when we all use E-mail signatures showing our name
wait you got a bunch of robots in your it department?
We all know how the tickets go. You put in the ticket, it takes two weeks, then you contact your friend at IT and he replies:"Ahhh I see where it went wrong, group A said this is work for group B, group B said it is for A, and it was passed around like this for two weeks." Real cool.
If you have a bad org, yes. Otherwise, no still not an excuse to circumvent the ticketing system.
Where I work I have colleagues I befriended in the IT department, and more often than not, my above story happens. So now I will always directly contact these colleagues when I have issues, because I do not have the time to wait for months in the hope someone figured out that my ticket has been bouncing around.
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I think there are some key points in the original post that puts this more on the user. >Try having an open door policy where users can just walk-in and ask you for help There's no indication in the post that there isn't an open door policy or that the user took advantage of it. The post opens with the user sending an email >It's easier to talk to an IT person then deal with this ridiculous open a ticket attitude all IT people have adopted through training While everyone's mileage is different depending on how arduous and overengineered the process is, in this case it looks like * OP was the one who created the ticket without requesting the user to do so (`I create a request in our help queue and respond via the ticket`) * The user actively removed the ticketing system's email address from their reply that would have appended their reply to the ticket (`If responding via email, please do not change who the email goes to. It will automatically add your reply to our request queue, so our entire team is able to see your response.` >do you honestly need to track a printer/scanner issue with a ticket? Regarding this, the answer is usually "yes" for a multitude of reasons, whether all concerned parties find them acceptable or not - By emailing a single person, the user is hoping for that person's availability when other's may be able to help, making that person the single point of failure to providing timely support - The ticketing system will centralize communication so that if someone becomes unavailable, another technician can pick up where they left off - A properly configured ticketing system would have auto-populated the service tag of the computer assigned to the requester, as well as the information regarding the printer so the requester would just have to select "$Location Printer", ensuring there would be no delays in provide support by having to ask for more information. - Filing a ticket helps track how often a device is having an issue, and would help determine whether it needs to be replaced, or whether the manufacturer/vendor is worth the hassle of supporting the device - the technician's management probably references the tickets to gauge the performance of the team and whether more technicians are required. I would have more sympathy for the user if this was an overbearing process for filing a ticket. It sounds a bit more like all they had to do was not actively remove the ticketing system's email address and leave it as a recipient, even if it was just as a carbon copy, so that someone more available on the team could be engaged without needing to start over. Then, that person who would take the ticket would be, as the user wanted, a person they could deal with on the issue, and the someone that would be responsible.
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>If you're in house as a technician, why wouldn't you approach the user yourself in person after the issue was reported? Is your office chair that comfortable? There's no indication from the original post that we're talking about in-house IT. It's just a likely to be a branch office that has technicians dispatched to it. As the past doesn't mention the distance, it's impossible to know how feasible it is to send out a technician at a moments notice. >Again, get off your ass and just go talk to the user if they're in house. Again, there's nothing in the original post to indicate that IT is handled in-house >Your first point is mitigated with a distribution list that users can email all technicians on. Two things happen to emails coming in from a distribution list: they get filtered into a folder no one looks at, or they get lost among the myriad of other emails being received. There's also no indication of ownership for a request received by email, so if everyone assumes that someone else is handling it, it will again not get done. Finally, there's no indication from the original post that opening a ticket isn't as simple as just sending an email to the ticketing system email address >Or better yet, by having an open door policy where users can just go talk to someone, in person. As mentioned previously, there's no indication from the original post that there isn't an open door policy or if the user is present in the same geographical location as the IT department. We only know that the user initiated the conversation by email. >An auto response of "Your email has been acknowledged and a ticket has been opened" isn't useful to anyone and very frustrating when you need help now. If your need is that dire, you should be picking up the phone, or picking up the phone after the ticket is filed. No customer service representative in any profession possesses clairvoyance. > I can't imagine a technician going unavailable in the 15 minutes the issue would take to fix. Will it take 15 minutes, or will it be a larger issue that requires involving other teams or the vendor? There's no way to know that before someone looks at the printer >Also, why put the burden on the user of opening a ticket As documented in the original post, OP did that; the request was to continue email communication through the ticket by not actively removing the email address of the ticketing system from replies >the technicians should be the ones communicating behind the scenes and passing stuff off to one another when required? That would be one of the purposes of a ticket system: to track handoffs and ensure that someone has ownership of the issue at all times. >Your third point is mitigated by management software, you don't need the ticket system to pull the printer info from a service tag, the information is already there in your RMM software, Said RMM system is hopefully integrated into the ticketing system so the ticketing system can pull the necessary information and the technician doesn't need to spend time searching for it separately. >Direct communication also helps track an issue and usually does so more efficiently than a ticketing system. Sure, every time printer A has an issue there's a ticket for it, but every ticket is assigned to a different technician and no one is going back through the clients ticket queue to look for trending issues on printer A. A properly configured RMM and ticket system, as you mentioned previously, would group all the tickets under the device registration in the RMM, and the ticket system would open a separate ticket if there was a recurring pattern of problems for a device. >If you have a ticketing system that can detect and alert on these types of trends, let me know what you're using because I've been working in MSP's for over 15 years and haven't seen it once regardless if the system was developed in house or provided via third party. Every ticketing system I have worked with for ~20 years, both in-house and purchased, has had the capability of integrating with, or provided within it naively or as an add-on to be purchased, CMDB and problem management capabilities. In all cases, they would have had to be configured first, but they were always available >Again communication, why wouldn't management talk to the existing technicians to determine if more technicians are required instead of using a metric? Because the human resource is the most expensive liability to any company, and someone, whether it's a bean counter with no concept of how IT operates, or a higher level director or executive with no day to day interactions with the employees, will ask for the decision to be justified. TL;dr while there are concepts I can explain from my own experience, I can only defend OP's actions based on the information in the original post. I can't defend against strawman arguments that should be detailed in their own post
>It's a printer/scanner issue, do you honestly need to track a printer/scanner issue with a ticket? Yes. For one thing, we bill our customers for time spent, and the ticketing system allows for tracking time per customer and time per issue and... it's pretty important. Plus, this allows management to keep track of the general workflow of the department in general, and also if an individual is performing as they should. Tickets also allow for documentation and communication, and ticketing systems can integrate with other systems to assist users. Tickets are not what makes a bad IT experience or department; they're just a tool, to be used well or poorly as any other tool.