Often, when an incident’s priority is determined by an agent, it results in ambiguity. More robust methods to prioritize tickets will help agents to manage their workload with more focus on critical and time-bound incidents. 

 

In Freshservice, you can create a Priority Matrix to standardize the Priority decisions. This removes the ambiguity around an agent’s guesses and makes priority determination simple and structured.

 

Priority Matrix allows an admin to define what Priority should be used based on each combination of Urgency and Impact associated with an incident.

 

Simply put,

Priority = Impact x Urgency

 

Impact- The effect an incident will have on service levels.

For example, an internet outage will have a "High" impact as it can affect many employees. But, if an internet outage happens only for a particular conference room, it may have a "Low" impact.

 

Urgency- Determines how soon an incident should be resolved.

Adding to the previous example, if the business is into shares and stocks, every minute of internet downtime will cost them money. Hence, the incident will have a “High” urgency. Similarly, since it is only a conference room that is experiencing internet downtime and not a workstation, it may have a “Low” urgency.

 

Both Impact and Urgency are rather simple to determine when compared to Priority.

 

To enable the Priority Matrix for your account, 

  • Navigate to Admin > Service Management > Service Desk settings > Priority Matrix. If your account has more than one workspace, navigate to Admin > {Worskpace Name} >  Service Management > Service Desk settings > Priority Matrix
  • Toggle ON the Enable Priority Matrix option.

 

  • The admin can edit and choose a Priority from the drop-down for each pair of levels under Impact and Urgency. 

For example, an Admin can mandate that when a "High" Urgency ticket comes into the service desk and if the agent determines that its Impact is "Low", then the Priority must be set to "Medium". This ensures that there is a standardized process to ascertain the Priority and help agents focus on more important tickets.

 

 

 

 

  • Once you’ve specified the Priority for all the levels of Impact and Urgency, click on Save to finish.

 

Henceforth, the Priority of incidents created on the service desk is automatically assigned based on its Impact and Urgency.

 

Asset Impact

Asset impact is used for automatically passing impact from the list of associated assets to the "impact" field of Incident. Priority matrix logic on Incident will be applied according to the updated Incident impact field. It can be enabled using the 'Pass associated Asset impact to Incident' toggle.

 

It compares the existing "impact" field in Incident details page against the respective impacts of all associated assets and updates the value to whichever is the highest among the two.

 

For example, if the existing Incident impact field value is "Medium" and when a "High" impact asset is associated with Incident, the Incident impact field value will be updated to "High" from "Medium". This change is always from a lower value to higher and not the other way to ensure that the system doesn’t downgrade existing higher impact. So, the value can change from "Low" to "Medium" or from "Medium" to "High" but not from "High" to "Low".

 

 

Note:

  • Using Field Customization, you can enable your end-users to specify the Impact and Urgency of an incident at the time of creating one on the self-service portal.
  • Agents can override the Impact, Urgency and pre-set Priority at any time by updating the Ticket Properties.