Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, April 18, 2005:
Help Desk Priorities
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.I found this link via del.icio.us. It's a guys tribute to the worst help desk technician he knows, it's kind of interesting but not the point of this post. What I want to talk about is the screenshots of his help desks request tracking tool. Take a look:
Now if you think to the next step, let's say something is urgent. Well you would mark it urgent and most likely make it a high priority. Well wouldn't all urgent requests be a high priority by definition? OK let's take it the other way and say it's not urgent and in fact the help desk technician decides it's a low priority.
In all my time talking with users about their problems few would every classify them as low priority. They may not be urgent, but low implies that a leisurely pace can be taken with finding a resolution. So what I'm saying is that I just don't believe in prioritizing customer service requests. It ends up taking a bunch of time to figure out is this low, medium, high, low urgency, medium urgency, high urgency and in the end it usually just ends up being a guess by the help desk associate not a real indication of priority.
That's why in HelpSpot there's only one choice. A simple checkbox that indicates if the request is urgent or not. It's usually easy to tell if something is urgent or not (lots of yelling
). I think it's going to be a time saver for the help desk team as well as making life a bit easier for level 2 support since they don't have to worry about what something marked priority medium high urgency means.
Discussion
"Well wouldn’t all urgent requests be a high priority by definition?"
I'm going to nitpick here: there are issues that can be urgent and medium prio: those that //really// are medium prio but only make sense when done right now. (Like picking up the newspaper TODAY if you specifically want that one story, but don't want your newspaper-retrieval-team put everything aside to do it. Not having the newspaper is okay, fetching the newspaper tomorrow is not.)
However, I don't think anyone will use it like that, or even sees the distinction.
Created by Jilles Oldenbeuving on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Yep and help desk software already has alot of form fields by it's very nature so simplifying by even one field makes the interface more usable. Especially when the field was pretty useless to begin with.
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Heh, maybe someday UserScape will be big enough that I can have my own newspaper retrieval team
I see your point and there are probably a few uses for having both fields especially in organizations that have built some procedures already around them. But when I've really asked people about it what I realize is that 98% of the time people either don't use them or use them incorrectly so I think the benefits of dropping priority outweigh the occasionally side effects.
Also I think there are other ways to convey the same information if you need to. For instance, mark the request urgent, but leave a note in the request for your newspaper guy that it's ok to not do it first but to do it today. Since these odd situations are infrequent, making the request urgent gets the newspaper guys attention so they're likely to read the note carefully where you convey the rest of the info.
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
It's a bit like e-mail priorities. Once in a while, someone clicks the High Priority button. But how many e-mails marked as Low Priority do we receive ?
Created by Serge Wautier on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
That hellspawn of an application is called Remedy. Don't bother with their website; it's full of marketese and oh-how-good-our-product-is text without actually showing you their product (which is totally understandable; otherwise, all their potential customers would ran away screaming in pain.)
Created by Leonardo Herrera on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Heh, great comment Leonardo. I'm familiar with Remedy but have never seen a good screenshot, I guess that's it. Wow it's even worse than I thought. What do you expect for 100K huh
It's amazing IT departments can justify the huge money they spend on these "enterprise" solutions which are easily confused with an Access application.
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Excellent point.
I never understood the point of it either. Though somehow, I am getting the feeling that almost all the request will be marked with urgent checkbox as selected! 
[What's the default?]
On a slightly related note, I don't even like rating any stuff on 1 to 5 scale. I would rather have choices like
1. I hate it!
2. I find this ok.
3. I love it!
I mean for me, there is no difference between giving an item rating of 4 or rating of 5, likewise rating of 1 and rating of 2 is same. That's just me! 
Btw, that's a nice little preview of your app! Can't wait for the beta version!
JD
Created by JD on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Yeah I really dislike 1-5 scales. As you say I much prefer 1-3 either as numbers or with mood ratings as you have there.
It defaults to off or not urgent. Hopefully they all don't get marked urgent . Actually to me that's what makes it now a much easier decision. The help desk person only needs to decide if this is more critical than a "normal" request as opposed to where on the scale does this one relate to a "normal" request.
Yep, keep your eyes out for more posts with screenshots. Now that things are getting together a bit I'm going to do these types of posts more often. I look to be on schedule to get the beta out at the end of May like I hoped. We'll see, you never know in software
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
I worked in a network operations center 10 years ago (using a heavily customized Remedy installation). We had a severity ranking (1,2,3) that had solid definitions for each number: 1 meant total loss of service, 2 meant a degradation of service and 3 meant "something else". The trick to our workflow was that we also had a "next action" with a time and a one-line description. This worked really well, because outages, more often than not, were caused by a problem with local teleco facilities. So, we'd put a call in and then set a next action to badger them later.
We had a display set up that told everyone which next actions were due (allowing someone to claim that they are working on one) and which ones were coming up.
I agree that the distinction between priority and urgency is too fine for almost anyone. Not every help desk needs timed next actions, but it was a lifesaver in the NOC environment.
Created by Kevin Dangoor on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Good point Kevin. There are definitely organizations where more information is needed and more importantly where the help desk is correctly organized to properly use those additional definitions. To support those help desks that need more fields HelpSpot does support custom fields, so for a particular installation you could add a field like you describe. In your "workspace" you can also view your queue through filters against that new field to achieve what you describe.
Most help desks I've seen lack this type of fine organization and the extra fields just get in the way as discussed above, so out of the box they're not included.
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
The ANS NOC was well-known for its good service, so it's not surprising that most help desks don't quite go to those extremes...
I'm sure that your custom fields and filters will be far easier than the mass of custom development around Remedy that had been required...
Created by Kevin Dangoor on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Hey Ian... glad to see a little snippet of HelpSpot!
A couple of quick things...
First, that is indeed Remedy. Although I would have to say looking from the screenshots that its a very OOTB installation and a pretty old one at that (at least 2+ years). I'm not saying Remedy is the greatest thing since sliced bread but they do have something like 80% market share of the top Fortune 100. Peregrine bought them for (I think) 1 billion, and later got sold to BMC for (i think) around 300 million... they're doing something right out there..
The other part about the statuses seems to be this: A customer can submit a ticket via phone, email, web, or a 32-bit "requestor" client. Basically the urgency is "customer urgency", and priority is "help desk priority". So in one sense, the customer may be freaking out about something that isnt as crucial as a real down-time situation.
I would agree that really only one field is needed, but that decision is heavily influenced by the quality of the help desk technician. It would only work if the tech knew enough about the situation to give the ticket a proper priority classification.
Created by Liam Strand on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
"Well wouldn’t all urgent requests be a high priority by definition?"
I'm going to nitpick here: there are issues that can be urgent and medium prio: those that //really// are medium prio but only make sense when done right now. (Like picking up the newspaper TODAY if you specifically want that one story, but don't want your newspaper-retrieval-team put everything aside to do it. Not having the newspaper is okay, fetching the newspaper tomorrow is not.)
However, I don't think anyone will use it like that, or even sees the distinction.
Created by Jilles Oldenbeuving on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Hey Liam,
Oh I agree Remedy is a monster, and I want to make clear that Remedy is not a competitor to HelpSpot. Nobody thinking about Remedy is going to also be thinking about HelpSpot.
The thing with Remedy is that it's standard "big IT" infrastructure size solution. It doesn't necessarily do alot more than another solution but the company itself is big enough to do the things bigco's need done. They have a sales force that can come in and pitch to the CTO and stuff like that. Joel had a good article on it here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
Anyway, the help desk technician knowing how to classify everything is really my point. It's rarely the case that this can be done correctly even by a very competent associate. How often have you called a company for support and asked them to fix your problem whenever they get around to it? So now the poor technician has to guess at what the priority is and at that point why bother prioritizing if you're just guessing.
This is definitely one of the little differences HelpSpot is going to try that I'm very interested in seeing how it works for people. It's worked pretty well in small trials but we won't really know until it's for sale and distributed. Exciting stuff!
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Yep and help desk software already has alot of form fields by it's very nature so simplifying by even one field makes the interface more usable. Especially when the field was pretty useless to begin with.
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Heh, maybe someday UserScape will be big enough that I can have my own newspaper retrieval team
I see your point and there are probably a few uses for having both fields especially in organizations that have built some procedures already around them. But when I've really asked people about it what I realize is that 98% of the time people either don't use them or use them incorrectly so I think the benefits of dropping priority outweigh the occasionally side effects.
Also I think there are other ways to convey the same information if you need to. For instance, mark the request urgent, but leave a note in the request for your newspaper guy that it's ok to not do it first but to do it today. Since these odd situations are infrequent, making the request urgent gets the newspaper guys attention so they're likely to read the note carefully where you convey the rest of the info.
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
It's a bit like e-mail priorities. Once in a while, someone clicks the High Priority button. But how many e-mails marked as Low Priority do we receive ?
Created by Serge Wautier on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
That hellspawn of an application is called Remedy. Don't bother with their website; it's full of marketese and oh-how-good-our-product-is text without actually showing you their product (which is totally understandable; otherwise, all their potential customers would ran away screaming in pain.)
Created by Leonardo Herrera on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Heh, great comment Leonardo. I'm familiar with Remedy but have never seen a good screenshot, I guess that's it. Wow it's even worse than I thought. What do you expect for 100K huh
It's amazing IT departments can justify the huge money they spend on these "enterprise" solutions which are easily confused with an Access application.
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Excellent point.
I never understood the point of it either. Though somehow, I am getting the feeling that almost all the request will be marked with urgent checkbox as selected! [What's the default?]
On a slightly related note, I don't even like rating any stuff on 1 to 5 scale. I would rather have choices like
1. I hate it!
2. I find this ok.
3. I love it!
I mean for me, there is no difference between giving an item rating of 4 or rating of 5, likewise rating of 1 and rating of 2 is same. That's just me!
Btw, that's a nice little preview of your app! Can't wait for the beta version!
JD
Created by JD on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Yeah I really dislike 1-5 scales. As you say I much prefer 1-3 either as numbers or with mood ratings as you have there.
It defaults to off or not urgent. Hopefully they all don't get marked urgent . Actually to me that's what makes it now a much easier decision. The help desk person only needs to decide if this is more critical than a "normal" request as opposed to where on the scale does this one relate to a "normal" request.
Yep, keep your eyes out for more posts with screenshots. Now that things are getting together a bit I'm going to do these types of posts more often. I look to be on schedule to get the beta out at the end of May like I hoped. We'll see, you never know in software
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
I worked in a network operations center 10 years ago (using a heavily customized Remedy installation). We had a severity ranking (1,2,3) that had solid definitions for each number: 1 meant total loss of service, 2 meant a degradation of service and 3 meant "something else". The trick to our workflow was that we also had a "next action" with a time and a one-line description. This worked really well, because outages, more often than not, were caused by a problem with local teleco facilities. So, we'd put a call in and then set a next action to badger them later.
We had a display set up that told everyone which next actions were due (allowing someone to claim that they are working on one) and which ones were coming up.
I agree that the distinction between priority and urgency is too fine for almost anyone. Not every help desk needs timed next actions, but it was a lifesaver in the NOC environment.
Created by Kevin Dangoor on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Good point Kevin. There are definitely organizations where more information is needed and more importantly where the help desk is correctly organized to properly use those additional definitions. To support those help desks that need more fields HelpSpot does support custom fields, so for a particular installation you could add a field like you describe. In your "workspace" you can also view your queue through filters against that new field to achieve what you describe.
Most help desks I've seen lack this type of fine organization and the extra fields just get in the way as discussed above, so out of the box they're not included.
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
The ANS NOC was well-known for its good service, so it's not surprising that most help desks don't quite go to those extremes...
I'm sure that your custom fields and filters will be far easier than the mass of custom development around Remedy that had been required...
Created by Kevin Dangoor on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Hey Ian... glad to see a little snippet of HelpSpot!
A couple of quick things...
First, that is indeed Remedy. Although I would have to say looking from the screenshots that its a very OOTB installation and a pretty old one at that (at least 2+ years). I'm not saying Remedy is the greatest thing since sliced bread but they do have something like 80% market share of the top Fortune 100. Peregrine bought them for (I think) 1 billion, and later got sold to BMC for (i think) around 300 million... they're doing something right out there..
The other part about the statuses seems to be this: A customer can submit a ticket via phone, email, web, or a 32-bit "requestor" client. Basically the urgency is "customer urgency", and priority is "help desk priority". So in one sense, the customer may be freaking out about something that isnt as crucial as a real down-time situation.
I would agree that really only one field is needed, but that decision is heavily influenced by the quality of the help desk technician. It would only work if the tech knew enough about the situation to give the ticket a proper priority classification.
Created by Liam Strand on 04.18.2005 11:04 am
Hey Liam,
Oh I agree Remedy is a monster, and I want to make clear that Remedy is not a competitor to HelpSpot. Nobody thinking about Remedy is going to also be thinking about HelpSpot.
The thing with Remedy is that it's standard "big IT" infrastructure size solution. It doesn't necessarily do alot more than another solution but the company itself is big enough to do the things bigco's need done. They have a sales force that can come in and pitch to the CTO and stuff like that. Joel had a good article on it here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
Anyway, the help desk technician knowing how to classify everything is really my point. It's rarely the case that this can be done correctly even by a very competent associate. How often have you called a company for support and asked them to fix your problem whenever they get around to it? So now the poor technician has to guess at what the priority is and at that point why bother prioritizing if you're just guessing.
This is definitely one of the little differences HelpSpot is going to try that I'm very interested in seeing how it works for people. It's worked pretty well in small trials but we won't really know until it's for sale and distributed. Exciting stuff!
-----
Created by Ian on 04.18.2005 11:04 am