Incident Management


Simply put, an incident is an unplanned interruption to an IT service or a reduction in quality of an IT service.


Incident Management is responsible for proper logging, analyzing and (especially) resolving incidents. It’s primary objective is to help resume service operations as quickly as possible.


Incident Management in Freshservice


Every time a customer asks for support or submits a query in through the support portal, it becomes a ticket. 


The ticket is now your means of interacting with the customer and every conversation is
recorded and can be referred back to, if need be. It should be noted that every customer
interaction can become a ticket if required, from email, your website, Social Media, phone calls
or any other means.


Creating a Ticket


To create a ticket, 


●Click New in the top-right corner.
● Select Incident (depending on the request type).


● Enter the details in Submit a ticket form.● Attach supporting files if necessary
● Click on Save, Save and Close, or Save and New to save changes.


Why the different ‘Save’ options?


While creating a ticket, you can use the most relevant option. Here’s what they do:

  • Save - Save changes and create the ticket.

  • Save and New - Save changes, create this ticket and then create another ticket.

  • Save and Close - Save changes, create the ticket and change its status to ‘closed’. Use the
    option when you need to just document an incident etc.


Ticket Acknowledgement


Once a customer sends a service query, a complaint, or a request to your company’s support, they will automatically receive an email acknowledging that their request has been received.


There will also be a link to your support portal where the customer can check the status of the Ticket & add comments.


Replying to, and resolving a ticket


When a requester raises a ticket, it becomes an ‘open’ ticket. You can respond to it by clicking on Reply and your answer will be sent to the customer’s email as well as get posted on the tickets page itself. It will create a thread, which even the customer will have access to. This gives you a clear view of the complaints received, and the support extended to a specific customer minimizing confusion and repetition of queries from your support staff’s side.

Once a ticket has been replied to, the status can be changed to Pending, and if the customer’s problem has been solved, the status can be changed to Resolved. Resolved tickets will be closed after a specific amount of time (that can be set/changed by an admin).


Quick Tip: 


While replying to the requester, you can save a lot of time by including solution articles or canned responses. 


Key Actions


Once a ticket is created, you can perform the following actions to it from your Freshservice account. 


Reply - You can reply to the ticket, which will be sent as an email to the requester. 

Forward - You can forward the entire conversation thread to another agent or person. 

Add note - You can add a private note where you can enter key details about a ticket which you want to keep for internal purposes. This will be of great help if the ticket is transferred or assigned to another agent in the future. 

Discuss - If you wish to discuss about the ticket with your fellow agents, you can make use of this option. This will open up a chat window where you can add your fellow agents, chat, share relevant files and even highlight key areas in a ticket. To know more about this feature, click here. 



Associate actions


You can link your incident ticket to several other modules of your service desk. You can do that by clicking on the Associate drop down present on the top right corner. 


The associate actions you can perform under this menu are: 

  • New Problem - You can associate the incident to a new problem by creating one. Clicking this option will open a form where you can fill in the details of the new problem. 

  • Existing Problem - You can choose from a list of existing problems and associate your incident ticket to it. 

  • New Change - You can associate your incident ticket to a new change

  • Existing Change - You can choose from list of existing changes and associate your incident to it. 

  • Project - You can associate your ticket to a new project

  • Project Task - You can associate your ticket to an existing project task

More Actions


Additional actions include: 


  • Merge - You can merge your incident ticket with one or more existing ticket(s).

  • Scenarios - If you’ve created scenario automations under Settings, you can access and execute them from here

  • Time - You can add the start a timer to track the progress made on the ticket with respect to the lapsed time.

  • Edit - You can edit different aspects of the ticket. 

  • Print - Print a hard copy of the ticket. 

  • Mark as Spam - Mark the ticket as spam. 

  • Delete - Delete the ticket.


Apart from these options, you can also update these ticket properties right from the ticket
view page:


● Due Date - Today, this week etc. or <A specific date/time>.
● Priority - High, low, urgent etc.
● Status - Open, resolved, closed etc.
● Source - Email, phone, chat etc.
● Type - Incident/Service request
● Group - Database team, hardware team etc.
● Assigned to - <Agent name>
● Department - Finance, HR etc.
● Tags - <Issue-specific tags>


Note: These are the default fields. You can add or remove fields using the ‘Field Templates’ option in the Admin panel.


Requestor Info


You can use this to get a quick info about requester i.e. the person that sent you the ticket, including a quick synopsis of the recent tickets that you received from them. You’ll be able to see their 10 most recent tickets. 


Child Tickets


If you have other incident tickets that talk about the same issue as your current ticket, you can add them as child tickets to this ticket. 


Tasks


If you need to split the ticket into tasks and assign the tasks to specific agents for faster resolution, click on the Tasks button right below the ticket description. A task can have a due date etc. different from the parent ticket. 


Associate a CI


To associate a Configuration Item with the ticket, click on the corresponding button and select an item from the list. 


Request Approval


In case the ticket needs approval, you can send a canned mail to request for it. Click on Approval → Request Approval to do so. 


Activities


It lets you see a list of all activities performed on the ticket since the time it was created.


Actions on the Ticket List Page


Under the incident module, the first thing you will see is the list of incident tickets that were submitted. Freshservice allows you to perform certain actions when you select single or multiple tickets from the list. The actions are: 


  • Pick up - The ticket(s) will be assigned to you. 

  • Assign to Agent - You can assign ticket(s) to your fellow agent

  • Close - You can close selected ticket(s)

  • Bulk Actions - You can update several parameters of the chosen ticket(s) such as the status, priority, department, category, etc. 

  • Merge - Merge chosen ticket(s)

  • Flag Spam - Mark the chosen ticket(s) as spam

  • Delete - Delete selected ticket(s)



Filtering Tickets


The right side bar on the ticket list view allows you to filter ticket based various parameters. They are: 


  • Agent

  • Requester email

  • Companies

  • Groups

  • Created time

  • Due date

  • Status

  • Priority

  • Urgency

  • Impact

  • Type 

  • Source

  • Tags

  • Category

  • Issue type

  • Issue Classification

  • Location

  • Issue category