Capturing of Service Portal Requests

[Michael Sharp]

Good afternoon,

Few questions all related actually:

1. Under what circumstances would a request have a status of "New"?
2. When a user logs a request through the service portal - do you have any tips on how these should be distributed or captured by our technicians?  Currently we log everything from an email so is triaged on arrival - we have a dashboard widget that shows all emails unread in the Inbox waiting to be triaged.
3. Is it possible to have a widget that shows [Unread Emails in Inbox + Unread requests submitted via the Portal]?  Or would these have to be separate?

Regards,

Mike.

[Martyn Houghton]

@Michael Sharp

In relation to the primary New status, we used to use this and in our case set it via the BPM process itself, but we moved away from this due to the standard Request List filters, which mean that if you had it filtered to Open, you would not see New requests as they are not included as the filter is literal on the primary status. We moved to using a 'New' Sub Status within the primary 'Open' status so analyst working form the 'Open'filter would seem them.

In terms of assignment from request coming in from the portal, we use a mixture depending on service desk in question. Most we use the Auto Assign Round Robin process, but if not one is available we assign the team and then send notifications/email to the team. Others we just assign to the team, but both set it status of 'Open' and Sub Status of 'New'. We do have widgets on a dashboard for these but they are separate.

For Emails we have both manual process of the team monitoring the shared mailbox and for some services we have routing rules which use the raise new request and update request. We would like to use more of the routing rules, but there are some limitations with their flexibility at the moment. 

Cheers

Martyn

 

 

[Keith]

@Michael Sharp as usual @Martyn Houghton beat me to it

As Martyn states, the New status would need to be explicitly set in your BPM. We've never used the new status though TBH. 

We have a really complex routing structure with many multi national teams supporting different aspects of the same service/BPM. Using the logging category along with site is absolutely essential for us with lots of decision points in the BPM to assist with the routing. Ideally you should route to a team rather than naming an individual in your BPM. Individuals will change over time making it difficult to administer the BPM. I mostly just route to a team and have them monitor and manage from there but you can set this to round robin if you want to spread the load more evenly but I find that letting the team decide who is the most appropriate person to deal with the call works for us.

I'll defer to someone else on the widgets as we mostly use PowerBI but it sounds like it should be possible.

Regards

 

Keith

 

 

[James Ainsworth]

The New status can be useful when working along side Response targets.  Having new requests that come up with the status of New can let you easily see which requests which are waiting for their initial response.  That may simply be that they are waiting to be assigned or waiting for the first communication back to the customer before it is changed to Open.  Once your response actions have been completed, you can set it to Open.

[Michael Sharp]

Thanks all for your comments - I have configured my BPM to display requests as "New" until allocated so I know which ones have been "seen" as such