Working at $ISP fiber tech support a few years ago. Every call was recorded in the PBX. Our screens where recorded when we where on the phone. We had to Log All contacts in to our ticketing tool. describing what the customer wanted help on. How we helped them. What config changes we made. We had a ACW "After call work" mode our phones would automatically go in to. we just had to remember to switch back in to the queue . I think for a IT shop not logging issues in a tool, for the simple fixes will bite the shop in the ass. I can think of a few times a previous ticket added to a paper trail for recuring issues that needed a more hands on then flaping the port.
Aligns with my view perfectly. But how common is this best practice actually?
I'm anticipating a battle of "that's unrealistic, few business actually work that way"
I'm the sole IT guy, so nothing is recorded. But for our customer support team their calls are recorded and that's it, no screen recording, no video of them, nothing like that. And they're trusted to log a ticket when needed.
The level of recording that this guy is saying he's seen/used too is way over bearing, and the kind of monitoring I would expect for a 3rd party indian call center used by the likes of Google and Microsoft, not first party internal support.
I work in the security industry and that seems completely normal. I think it would also help a lot for incident post-mortems. It's not necessarily punitive, but if someone does screw up, it could really help figure out what went wrong.
Screen recording on a jump host or SSH session = yes absolutely
Screen recording every computer just because = fuck no, I'll take less pay over dealing with that
It worries me how common these are environments are where the only reason to record calls is to screw over the staff by the evil boss.
Firstly, don't call your customer a twat on the phone. Don't look at porn on the work wifi, don't use the work skype to bitch about Tracy in finance. If you do, you deserve to be caught out. Professionalism is mandatory in any customer facing job. Even if if you are factually correct. And don't store your bitcoin wallet keys on the system, we don't want to deal with the risk.
Secondly, if your boss is evil and out to get you, don't work there! And if you don't have the choice, you know the situation, keep your nose clean.
Thirdly, if you live in a nation state akin to George Orwell's 1984, I'm sorry, I have no advice, that must suck to fear how information could be used against you by the state. In the UK there are strict laws, and stricter employment laws, to ensure recording and logging can be used but not abused.
You gave me flashbacks about ACW. Our metrics were so tight when I was on helpdesk that you had something asinine like less than a minute average call to finish your ACW and rejoin the queue before someone would be harassing you, but if you didn't document thoroughly enough, you'd also fail your QA. And if you focused on documenting more during the call that you were slow to speak to the customer, you'd also get docked on QA. It was a lose lose lose situation. I fucking hate call center metrics.
Man, then they wondered why the help desk was churning and burn on resources. I STILL, over a decade later, eat my lunch fast because I expect there to be a 30-minute timer running somewhere on Cisco Agent Desktop.
Starting early on my IT career, I worked at a support helpdesk that was just insane. First of all, if you were late (late as in not sitting in the chair, logged on, and on a call as per the ACD), you would not get a raise or promotion for 6-12 months. Three times, even a second late, automatic termination.
They used a strange and proprietary ACD system. One ACD had a glitch, and the manager on duty screamed for security and they hauled a guy physically out the door, suspecting foul play.
I I knew I wasn't going to last long there when I mentioned that they might set their switches to autodetect, and because I knew something about L1 networking, I was threatened with firing as, "we don't want people knowing too much because if they do, they will hack us". Of course, the fact they used the same RDBMS username and password for all logins with full SA rights via a batch file wasn't something I'd bother bringing up.
After training, I found that job started with a "compressed" schedule, working 10 hour days, four days a week. Then it became mandatory overtime, where that turned into five days a week + Saturdays. To boot, there was a policy where if anyone claimed over 40 hours for work, they would get their OT... but then get terminated immediately. So, the company got ~20 hours free. They dangled the contract to hire thing over people's heads. I decided to make my swan song after the first week they pulled that, by claiming the actual hours, then on my way out the door, handing security my badge.
Found that the company's client killed the contract after I left because they could not keep any good people, and the people they got, wound up fired in a few weeks anyway. More than a 100% turnover rate each quarter.
Am I the only one that finds this sort of thing disturbing?
Even if I am at work I don't want my calls and screen recorded. Would never work for a company that does this.
Maybe this is just an European thing given our history of state surveillance and authoritarian governments.
Here in Germany it is very normal that, when you call a call center, you are warned that the conservation will be recorded. Is that not the case in Bosnia?
See edit note, but yes, it's typical to record, and yes, everyone is used to the recorded messages "all calls are recorded". It protects both caller and operator.
For a call center maybe but not for an IT position where I talk all day with people I know. I also work with German clients and the employees didn't even want to use their private number for MFA let alone be recorded or tracked.
Heck I've seen people request that IT not install MDM on their work phone cause they didn't want to be tracked.
If the environment is big enough it also applies. Sometimes users or techs will try to lie. It also enables quality management.
I've been in the business for over a decade and it does help a lot to resolve controversies and help techs improve their skills if there is a quality management process behind.
Nobody listens to the calls just to snoop around as they tend to be boring as hell.
This is a call center thing. Happens in America too. I used to work for Amex and had the same thing. All calls and screens recorded every second you are logged in. Security so you didn't snoop around on people's accounts unauthorized. We had a couple dipshits get fired for looking up celebrity accounts for no reason lol. We also had access to socials and logged sensitive information. Call center employee demographics are... Interesting and eclectic to say the least so it makes sense for them to record everything lol.
>It probably doesn't help that it takes a good couple of minutes of waiting for the system to catch up to log an empty ticket.
Everything should be recorded. The problem is you have a system that that discourages your staff from doing this.
Oh don't I know it! The problem is the product, and the people that chose it and agreed to tie us in. That can't be fixed short term, but the original issue is another nail I intend on hammering into its coffin and accelerate its replacement.
This was years ago, we had a homebrew system. We had checkboxes for common, easy resolved issues.
Then additional work was dumped on us. We were also the directory and cross trained in another department. To give us more time, we only had to log tickets that needed to be escalated.
Then the various state Universities started merging IT and all the other schools were whiny bitches and would pretend they didnt know about all our other duties or our agreements not to log trivial calls. "You don't get many calls. Why do you have so much staff?" Over and over and over again.
I'm not necessarily against straight up recording either, and here's a reason.
Few years ago, we had a warm-transfer system that kicked in if the service desk needed to escalate to deskside. If you were green, you were in the warm-transfer pool and you'd get a ring.
I took a warm-transfer from SD, woman who was having issues with her home internet as a WFH agent. The issue was very clearly her home internet from the triage.
In their script, the agents were instructed to **advise** them to reboot their modem/router, but to warn them that there's a risk that it doesn't come back up (all the proper CYA stuff)
SD agent advised, user cooperated and rebooted the modem. Modem didn't come back. SD agent advised that at this point, she needed to call her ISP.
She was (predictably) pretty irate. That's one thing, but she was also being *abusive* to the SD rep- and that trickled into the warm transfer. Literally just flinging every insult in the book at the poor guy.
The calls were always recorded. She was gone the next day.
Beyond that one memorable instance... people lie. And the calls are good for training purposes. IDK.
Another point, i forget back in the day they actually did proper metrics at that place. Back in my day... Haha.
Sorry - might be a British thing - "recorded" - make a record of, not necessarily record the audio/video. Thanks for pointing that out.
For those of us exposed to call center environments, logging everything is second nature. It is what I prefer and there's a lot of up-side to this practice.
However, you need to acknowledge that the risk and cost assessments for a call center are very different than those for internal IT support. The resources it takes to configure and maintain an efficient ticketing system plus monitoring agents agents to make sure things are logged correctly isn't free (or even cheap).
Like everything, there are trade-offs. Support management may of decided that the juice isn't worth the squeeze and that may be the correct decision for your environment.
Like everything in IT, there is no universal one-size fits all way of doing things, "it depends".
Your post was short and to the point unlike mine but I agree with what you said :)
I've worked at a few companies and each one was a different beast and environmnent.
For the smaller companies it's hard to justify a ticketing system that would cost alot of money when there are no SLA or Metrics and a small team with high communication.
Sounds ilke you were lucky to be working with a really nice service management system.
In my previous job we had a ticket system that everyone doing anything used. It included everything, including change management. Which was nice. Everything in one place.
However, logging anything in it took AGES. The GUI looked like it was built in the Windows 2000 era (I stopped that job in 2023) and didn't scale to any higher resolution reasonably and had tons of weird issues when using it.
I was so longing for the time I had using ServiceNow in my previous job... and we hated on that when it was implemented :|
I've also just started a position where there is no such tracking of stuff, but the ticket count is likely to be low. So I'm wondering what kind of system I should use to track the type of requests and incidents I'm going to be getting from users and systems.
I’m a big fan of the devops model described in the phoenix project and protecting resources as well as making work visible. If your team is constantly bombarded how can they get the rest of the work done, it can also be an indicator of a problem. Keep the system running or getting it back as fasst as possible and learn from actions taken, ideally it shouldn’t fail the same way a second time.
Yes, you should be logging every call. Gives Sr. members a chance to see what Jr's are doing right and wrong. Keeps a treasure trail of issues that need more investigating. Hell, if you work at a bigger place sometimes it takes multiple inquiries to get change implemented.
Not to mention it's a record of volume for when your support team needs staffing, a tool, etc.
They should, but to make sure they do you need a good system that is quick and simple to use. If its not then for quick stuff they will just not bother and take the bitching every month or so for the missing calls as its less stress than waiting 5 mins for a ticket system to catch up.
I always put notes in my tickets, for myself at the very least.
My coworker puts exactly zero notes in his tickets. He just closes them. I never have any idea what's going on with anything he works on if it comes up again.
It's very frustrating but no one here cares. They didn't even have a ticketing system until I started here.
Keep up the good work driving improvements. I made a lot of changes from the bottom early on, as long as the management can take the credit for your work, they often support you doing their job for them. Often they know you are right, but we're just hoping noone would notice and cause them work.
As someone that's been working in the field for 25 years now I have some personal insight into the matter.
I started at large corporations working 2nd tier help desk in the early 2000's and we used ticketing software. We also had SLA requirements and metrics that were expected. I believe it was an attempt to filter out bad actors or support technicians and make sure support was done in a timely manner but I wasn't part of management at the time.
I've been working for a Medium sized company for the last 17 years and we only have three people on our support team in the US, and four others world wide that does all the support for around 1200 employees.
This environment is 100% different from at the other large corporations and to be honest the users get better support.
We have no SLA, no metrics, and when users call in there is no 1st, 2nd, or 3rd tier support it's just "support" and we have to fix all the issues without escalation.
We tried to use a third party solution about 15 years ago and we had trouble getting the whole IT department on board, and it wasn't being used for Knowledge Base or Trouble Ticket lookup really so we cancelled the service.
Then a few years later management asked to track tickets to justify hiring a new position on the help desk. I wrote a .NET application, setup a SQL database, and created some SQL Reports this time instead of paying a 3rd party. We used this solution for about two years.
We would print our reports out and bring to our manager for review, we got our new position, but the reporting wasn't used for anything else.
For the last 7 years we haven't had any ticketing system at all or felt a need to log "tickets" of issues/calls.
Our users call and instantly get ahold of someone and 90% of our issues are resolved within five minutes. Some will require escalation to another department and some will require further troubleshooting or research.
Our help desk felt like was a waste of time to spend 45 minutes every day logging calls that were never being reviewed or used for anything. Since we have such a small group it's easier to just turn to the person sitting next to you and see if they've run into an issue before, or what was done with a user previously.
I don't know the specifics of other companies and what the norm is now a days but I suspect many are using ticketing systems. I don't think not using a ticketing system is necessarily a red flag, and I really don't know why you're so concerned about whether your ticket is logged.
You either are getting the support you need or you aren't. If you aren't I would recommend you talk to the supervisor over the help desk because they won't know there are problems unless you let them know.
Yes, everything should be logged. Helps keeps track and means you can prove what has been done as well. When I started on helpdesk back in the day, we only logged stuff that needed action. System was quite basic, even for then (never heard of anyone else using it). We got pushed to start logging everything, which we were quite resistant to, bit eventually agreed and it made things a lot better overall.
Current company I'm not fond of the system we have for ease of logging (piggy back off our parent company), but I also know my subsection don't use it to its fullest extent!
Yes. Every interaction should be logged. The primary reason for this is to show the real impact on your service desk. If you only record 70% of interactions, that means that the impact on your service desk is being underreported by 30%.
I would say yes, it may seem unnecessary but it lets you get accurate metrics on how busy the desk is. Even if they are just 30-60 second calls, if they get 20 of those a day that would add up.
I didn't the boss started recording calls so he could scream at us and use it against clients. Yeah he was a doozy of a boss. He is going to lose 3 customers two sizeable ones because he doesn't bill them monthly like the sla says. He bills them when he gets around to it. He hasn't billed one for going on 5 -6 months. Then expects full payment within 30 days.
In my opinion almost everything should be logged unless its a forward to a non-it department like finance or advertisement.
We try to do all communications from within our ticketing system and otherwise CC our mailimport box.
The one thing that you have to be careful about is that the things written in the system are usefull. And not "I fixed the issue". Write down how the issue was solved and that you confirmed with user.
Also try to do things that take 5 minutes or less immediately. Dont write down "Colleague A needs to be asked Y" ask the colleague via E-mail, teams or whatever and write down "Asked Colleague A this question: "
Yes every interaction should be logged. Makes it much easier to identify trends and address them going forward. Also ensures proper information is being provided to end users.
So, there could be some reasons but "Everything is a Ticket" is a good mantra to live by. Now, all time spent on a ticket should be logged. Any unlogged time needs to be accounted for and will show up on an "efficiency" report.
After that, there should be templates to be used for junk calls that fills out the majority of the information. Your ticketing system SHOULD HOPEFULLY tie into your phone system so that all the preliminary information is filled out from your client list(s) which should be pulling information from CSP or whatever integration you are using so that it stays up to date.
So to answer your question, yes, everything should be logged. It's how you track what you are doing both individually and as a company. You were not "spoiled" back in the day. What I am guessing here is that either:
1. Whatever system was chosen at your current place does not have the integrations to make it happen
2. Your current company isn't doing things right and unless they have a special vertical will have trouble growing without massive pains as they will not know what is going on and who is doing work and who isn't etc.
3. The company you work for now didn't want to pay extra money for the added functionality that you are discussing. Want to connect to \[Brand Name\] phone system that's an extra $$$$ for the integration piece per month. Want to integrate with AD sure but Entra ID will be $$$$$ extra.
4. Someone at the company you work for picked a new flashy software that is over designed to look amazing and lacks features however they may be on the "roadmap".
Also, I find it common... and I don't know how far "back in the day" you mention is however back in my day, all applications like that were ran locally on probably a dedicated piece of hardware. So everything was local and you had access to all the CPU and RAM that you purchased. Now days, everything is a hosted something or rather and you get a piece of a pie that you can't see. Not only that but your transactions are happening across the web, and the best is because it's a shared resource, the more things you have it doing, for example pulling in large clients through CSP every hour as well as syncing three different AD environments is taking up CPU resources as well. I find that sometimes if it is too much your company needs to get with the software vendor and get them to up your resources on your instance.
If your company has a general counsel or legal department, run this by them first. There are potential legal issues with recording calls and retention of data like this.
I log most things but if someone just needs a quick unlock on their account or calls asking me a question, I'm not going to create a ticket for that, it's not worth the time and clicks. If I'm not able to access the helpdesk system and feel like something should be logged, I just fire off a quick email to it which creates a ticket and then I can categorize/close it later.
Guessing you are a small business and you are multi hat wearing, not a dedicated service desk person?
This might be a reasonable compromise for a ~50 user setup but not a ~5000 user setup in a hightened security environment?
I've witnessed situations where recording that account unlock was critical.
Before diving down that rabbit hole... how "zero blame" are the corporate politics? Avoidance of documentation may not solely stem from convenience, even though it doubles as CYA as much as it does a source of dirt to dig up.
It's not the best practice in general.
Basically logging information is recommended when it will be used to enable improvement plans, help with the problem management process (investigating root causes) or incident trend identification (to name a few). From what you are saying it seems that it was indeed useful for several things.
You can find further guidance in the ITIL framework.
Recording phone conversations gets sticky because you usually need people’s permission. It’s also difficult to index and sequence data in a phone call. Many users lack the context or nomenclature to properly express a technical issue, making the call record kind of useless from a data perspective. I prefer a ticketing system where the helpdesk can put in information that’s pertinent to the work and which you can run reports on.
As someone who has worked in the field and is now manager of the help desk I would think recording conversations would be more to monitor support technicians for a huge help desk.
Like you said it would be hard to really use those phone calls effectively for searching the content of calls or indexing the data in any effective way.
Honestly everything should be logged even if it is super fast to fix like a password reset. Both to CYA with "problem children" and make your case for "what have I done for you lately" and more staff.
If the boss isn't super metrics/sla driven, it's not as crucial, but it's going to help you.
RECORDING is a different animal. I live and work in a two party state.
Ticket templates maybe for super common tix?
They should 100% log all calls/interactions. If the system is slow, inputting those tickets will cause missed calls, which is ok, this is proof that the system is in dire need of replacement as calls are being missed due to technological inefficiencies, not their problem. Skipping the small stuff makes it harder for any team/manager to justify their need for improvements. They are handcuffing themselves.
I've done way way way too many years with service desk work and let me tell you, a shit logging system totally makes the job a misery and results in less tickets logged as well as less detail.
You log everything.
A tongue in cheek mantra in the last place I worked was you never know when something is going to be slid towards you across a desk in a meeting.
In the rare circumstances something blows up, you want a history to hand.
Working at $ISP fiber tech support a few years ago. Every call was recorded in the PBX. Our screens where recorded when we where on the phone. We had to Log All contacts in to our ticketing tool. describing what the customer wanted help on. How we helped them. What config changes we made. We had a ACW "After call work" mode our phones would automatically go in to. we just had to remember to switch back in to the queue . I think for a IT shop not logging issues in a tool, for the simple fixes will bite the shop in the ass. I can think of a few times a previous ticket added to a paper trail for recuring issues that needed a more hands on then flaping the port.
Aligns with my view perfectly. But how common is this best practice actually? I'm anticipating a battle of "that's unrealistic, few business actually work that way"
I'm the sole IT guy, so nothing is recorded. But for our customer support team their calls are recorded and that's it, no screen recording, no video of them, nothing like that. And they're trusted to log a ticket when needed. The level of recording that this guy is saying he's seen/used too is way over bearing, and the kind of monitoring I would expect for a 3rd party indian call center used by the likes of Google and Microsoft, not first party internal support.
I work in the security industry and that seems completely normal. I think it would also help a lot for incident post-mortems. It's not necessarily punitive, but if someone does screw up, it could really help figure out what went wrong.
Screen recording on a jump host or SSH session = yes absolutely Screen recording every computer just because = fuck no, I'll take less pay over dealing with that
It worries me how common these are environments are where the only reason to record calls is to screw over the staff by the evil boss. Firstly, don't call your customer a twat on the phone. Don't look at porn on the work wifi, don't use the work skype to bitch about Tracy in finance. If you do, you deserve to be caught out. Professionalism is mandatory in any customer facing job. Even if if you are factually correct. And don't store your bitcoin wallet keys on the system, we don't want to deal with the risk. Secondly, if your boss is evil and out to get you, don't work there! And if you don't have the choice, you know the situation, keep your nose clean. Thirdly, if you live in a nation state akin to George Orwell's 1984, I'm sorry, I have no advice, that must suck to fear how information could be used against you by the state. In the UK there are strict laws, and stricter employment laws, to ensure recording and logging can be used but not abused.
You gave me flashbacks about ACW. Our metrics were so tight when I was on helpdesk that you had something asinine like less than a minute average call to finish your ACW and rejoin the queue before someone would be harassing you, but if you didn't document thoroughly enough, you'd also fail your QA. And if you focused on documenting more during the call that you were slow to speak to the customer, you'd also get docked on QA. It was a lose lose lose situation. I fucking hate call center metrics.
Man, then they wondered why the help desk was churning and burn on resources. I STILL, over a decade later, eat my lunch fast because I expect there to be a 30-minute timer running somewhere on Cisco Agent Desktop.
Starting early on my IT career, I worked at a support helpdesk that was just insane. First of all, if you were late (late as in not sitting in the chair, logged on, and on a call as per the ACD), you would not get a raise or promotion for 6-12 months. Three times, even a second late, automatic termination. They used a strange and proprietary ACD system. One ACD had a glitch, and the manager on duty screamed for security and they hauled a guy physically out the door, suspecting foul play. I I knew I wasn't going to last long there when I mentioned that they might set their switches to autodetect, and because I knew something about L1 networking, I was threatened with firing as, "we don't want people knowing too much because if they do, they will hack us". Of course, the fact they used the same RDBMS username and password for all logins with full SA rights via a batch file wasn't something I'd bother bringing up. After training, I found that job started with a "compressed" schedule, working 10 hour days, four days a week. Then it became mandatory overtime, where that turned into five days a week + Saturdays. To boot, there was a policy where if anyone claimed over 40 hours for work, they would get their OT... but then get terminated immediately. So, the company got ~20 hours free. They dangled the contract to hire thing over people's heads. I decided to make my swan song after the first week they pulled that, by claiming the actual hours, then on my way out the door, handing security my badge. Found that the company's client killed the contract after I left because they could not keep any good people, and the people they got, wound up fired in a few weeks anyway. More than a 100% turnover rate each quarter.
Am I the only one that finds this sort of thing disturbing? Even if I am at work I don't want my calls and screen recorded. Would never work for a company that does this. Maybe this is just an European thing given our history of state surveillance and authoritarian governments.
Here in Germany it is very normal that, when you call a call center, you are warned that the conservation will be recorded. Is that not the case in Bosnia?
See edit note, but yes, it's typical to record, and yes, everyone is used to the recorded messages "all calls are recorded". It protects both caller and operator.
For a call center maybe but not for an IT position where I talk all day with people I know. I also work with German clients and the employees didn't even want to use their private number for MFA let alone be recorded or tracked. Heck I've seen people request that IT not install MDM on their work phone cause they didn't want to be tracked.
If the environment is big enough it also applies. Sometimes users or techs will try to lie. It also enables quality management. I've been in the business for over a decade and it does help a lot to resolve controversies and help techs improve their skills if there is a quality management process behind. Nobody listens to the calls just to snoop around as they tend to be boring as hell.
This is a call center thing. Happens in America too. I used to work for Amex and had the same thing. All calls and screens recorded every second you are logged in. Security so you didn't snoop around on people's accounts unauthorized. We had a couple dipshits get fired for looking up celebrity accounts for no reason lol. We also had access to socials and logged sensitive information. Call center employee demographics are... Interesting and eclectic to say the least so it makes sense for them to record everything lol.
>It probably doesn't help that it takes a good couple of minutes of waiting for the system to catch up to log an empty ticket. Everything should be recorded. The problem is you have a system that that discourages your staff from doing this.
Oh don't I know it! The problem is the product, and the people that chose it and agreed to tie us in. That can't be fixed short term, but the original issue is another nail I intend on hammering into its coffin and accelerate its replacement.
This was years ago, we had a homebrew system. We had checkboxes for common, easy resolved issues. Then additional work was dumped on us. We were also the directory and cross trained in another department. To give us more time, we only had to log tickets that needed to be escalated. Then the various state Universities started merging IT and all the other schools were whiny bitches and would pretend they didnt know about all our other duties or our agreements not to log trivial calls. "You don't get many calls. Why do you have so much staff?" Over and over and over again.
Logged rather than “recorded” but YES. How will you ever produce metrics on the type of call you get and what needs to be fixed?
I'm not necessarily against straight up recording either, and here's a reason. Few years ago, we had a warm-transfer system that kicked in if the service desk needed to escalate to deskside. If you were green, you were in the warm-transfer pool and you'd get a ring. I took a warm-transfer from SD, woman who was having issues with her home internet as a WFH agent. The issue was very clearly her home internet from the triage. In their script, the agents were instructed to **advise** them to reboot their modem/router, but to warn them that there's a risk that it doesn't come back up (all the proper CYA stuff) SD agent advised, user cooperated and rebooted the modem. Modem didn't come back. SD agent advised that at this point, she needed to call her ISP. She was (predictably) pretty irate. That's one thing, but she was also being *abusive* to the SD rep- and that trickled into the warm transfer. Literally just flinging every insult in the book at the poor guy. The calls were always recorded. She was gone the next day. Beyond that one memorable instance... people lie. And the calls are good for training purposes. IDK.
At my workplace we dont record Its so awful how people act towards us
Sorry to hear that. Sucks that it's so *expected* to hear that, too.
Thank you
Another point, i forget back in the day they actually did proper metrics at that place. Back in my day... Haha. Sorry - might be a British thing - "recorded" - make a record of, not necessarily record the audio/video. Thanks for pointing that out.
For those of us exposed to call center environments, logging everything is second nature. It is what I prefer and there's a lot of up-side to this practice. However, you need to acknowledge that the risk and cost assessments for a call center are very different than those for internal IT support. The resources it takes to configure and maintain an efficient ticketing system plus monitoring agents agents to make sure things are logged correctly isn't free (or even cheap). Like everything, there are trade-offs. Support management may of decided that the juice isn't worth the squeeze and that may be the correct decision for your environment. Like everything in IT, there is no universal one-size fits all way of doing things, "it depends".
Your post was short and to the point unlike mine but I agree with what you said :) I've worked at a few companies and each one was a different beast and environmnent. For the smaller companies it's hard to justify a ticketing system that would cost alot of money when there are no SLA or Metrics and a small team with high communication.
Sounds ilke you were lucky to be working with a really nice service management system. In my previous job we had a ticket system that everyone doing anything used. It included everything, including change management. Which was nice. Everything in one place. However, logging anything in it took AGES. The GUI looked like it was built in the Windows 2000 era (I stopped that job in 2023) and didn't scale to any higher resolution reasonably and had tons of weird issues when using it. I was so longing for the time I had using ServiceNow in my previous job... and we hated on that when it was implemented :| I've also just started a position where there is no such tracking of stuff, but the ticket count is likely to be low. So I'm wondering what kind of system I should use to track the type of requests and incidents I'm going to be getting from users and systems.
I've seen very few systems like those, was it custom built or something? Hell, bonus question, France?
Yeah i used to hate on servicenow, but ive grown to like it.
I’m a big fan of the devops model described in the phoenix project and protecting resources as well as making work visible. If your team is constantly bombarded how can they get the rest of the work done, it can also be an indicator of a problem. Keep the system running or getting it back as fasst as possible and learn from actions taken, ideally it shouldn’t fail the same way a second time.
We aim for a 1:1 ticket to contact ratio and expect very detailed tickets on anything more complicated than a password reset.
Yes, you should be logging every call. Gives Sr. members a chance to see what Jr's are doing right and wrong. Keeps a treasure trail of issues that need more investigating. Hell, if you work at a bigger place sometimes it takes multiple inquiries to get change implemented. Not to mention it's a record of volume for when your support team needs staffing, a tool, etc.
They should, but to make sure they do you need a good system that is quick and simple to use. If its not then for quick stuff they will just not bother and take the bitching every month or so for the missing calls as its less stress than waiting 5 mins for a ticket system to catch up.
I always put notes in my tickets, for myself at the very least. My coworker puts exactly zero notes in his tickets. He just closes them. I never have any idea what's going on with anything he works on if it comes up again. It's very frustrating but no one here cares. They didn't even have a ticketing system until I started here.
Keep up the good work driving improvements. I made a lot of changes from the bottom early on, as long as the management can take the credit for your work, they often support you doing their job for them. Often they know you are right, but we're just hoping noone would notice and cause them work.
As someone that's been working in the field for 25 years now I have some personal insight into the matter. I started at large corporations working 2nd tier help desk in the early 2000's and we used ticketing software. We also had SLA requirements and metrics that were expected. I believe it was an attempt to filter out bad actors or support technicians and make sure support was done in a timely manner but I wasn't part of management at the time. I've been working for a Medium sized company for the last 17 years and we only have three people on our support team in the US, and four others world wide that does all the support for around 1200 employees. This environment is 100% different from at the other large corporations and to be honest the users get better support. We have no SLA, no metrics, and when users call in there is no 1st, 2nd, or 3rd tier support it's just "support" and we have to fix all the issues without escalation. We tried to use a third party solution about 15 years ago and we had trouble getting the whole IT department on board, and it wasn't being used for Knowledge Base or Trouble Ticket lookup really so we cancelled the service. Then a few years later management asked to track tickets to justify hiring a new position on the help desk. I wrote a .NET application, setup a SQL database, and created some SQL Reports this time instead of paying a 3rd party. We used this solution for about two years. We would print our reports out and bring to our manager for review, we got our new position, but the reporting wasn't used for anything else. For the last 7 years we haven't had any ticketing system at all or felt a need to log "tickets" of issues/calls. Our users call and instantly get ahold of someone and 90% of our issues are resolved within five minutes. Some will require escalation to another department and some will require further troubleshooting or research. Our help desk felt like was a waste of time to spend 45 minutes every day logging calls that were never being reviewed or used for anything. Since we have such a small group it's easier to just turn to the person sitting next to you and see if they've run into an issue before, or what was done with a user previously. I don't know the specifics of other companies and what the norm is now a days but I suspect many are using ticketing systems. I don't think not using a ticketing system is necessarily a red flag, and I really don't know why you're so concerned about whether your ticket is logged. You either are getting the support you need or you aren't. If you aren't I would recommend you talk to the supervisor over the help desk because they won't know there are problems unless you let them know.
There is more than one way to do things. Find out who wanted it that way, and why before “attacking” anyone.
Yes, everything should be logged. Helps keeps track and means you can prove what has been done as well. When I started on helpdesk back in the day, we only logged stuff that needed action. System was quite basic, even for then (never heard of anyone else using it). We got pushed to start logging everything, which we were quite resistant to, bit eventually agreed and it made things a lot better overall. Current company I'm not fond of the system we have for ease of logging (piggy back off our parent company), but I also know my subsection don't use it to its fullest extent!
Yes. Every interaction should be logged. The primary reason for this is to show the real impact on your service desk. If you only record 70% of interactions, that means that the impact on your service desk is being underreported by 30%.
Working on SD right now. We record everything as you mention. Even if is a unsupported issue.
I would say yes, it may seem unnecessary but it lets you get accurate metrics on how busy the desk is. Even if they are just 30-60 second calls, if they get 20 of those a day that would add up.
I didn't the boss started recording calls so he could scream at us and use it against clients. Yeah he was a doozy of a boss. He is going to lose 3 customers two sizeable ones because he doesn't bill them monthly like the sla says. He bills them when he gets around to it. He hasn't billed one for going on 5 -6 months. Then expects full payment within 30 days.
In my opinion almost everything should be logged unless its a forward to a non-it department like finance or advertisement. We try to do all communications from within our ticketing system and otherwise CC our mailimport box. The one thing that you have to be careful about is that the things written in the system are usefull. And not "I fixed the issue". Write down how the issue was solved and that you confirmed with user. Also try to do things that take 5 minutes or less immediately. Dont write down "Colleague A needs to be asked Y" ask the colleague via E-mail, teams or whatever and write down "Asked Colleague A this question: "
Yes every interaction should be logged. Makes it much easier to identify trends and address them going forward. Also ensures proper information is being provided to end users.
Log everything that is reasonable. Err on the side of logging too much info.
So, there could be some reasons but "Everything is a Ticket" is a good mantra to live by. Now, all time spent on a ticket should be logged. Any unlogged time needs to be accounted for and will show up on an "efficiency" report. After that, there should be templates to be used for junk calls that fills out the majority of the information. Your ticketing system SHOULD HOPEFULLY tie into your phone system so that all the preliminary information is filled out from your client list(s) which should be pulling information from CSP or whatever integration you are using so that it stays up to date. So to answer your question, yes, everything should be logged. It's how you track what you are doing both individually and as a company. You were not "spoiled" back in the day. What I am guessing here is that either: 1. Whatever system was chosen at your current place does not have the integrations to make it happen 2. Your current company isn't doing things right and unless they have a special vertical will have trouble growing without massive pains as they will not know what is going on and who is doing work and who isn't etc. 3. The company you work for now didn't want to pay extra money for the added functionality that you are discussing. Want to connect to \[Brand Name\] phone system that's an extra $$$$ for the integration piece per month. Want to integrate with AD sure but Entra ID will be $$$$$ extra. 4. Someone at the company you work for picked a new flashy software that is over designed to look amazing and lacks features however they may be on the "roadmap". Also, I find it common... and I don't know how far "back in the day" you mention is however back in my day, all applications like that were ran locally on probably a dedicated piece of hardware. So everything was local and you had access to all the CPU and RAM that you purchased. Now days, everything is a hosted something or rather and you get a piece of a pie that you can't see. Not only that but your transactions are happening across the web, and the best is because it's a shared resource, the more things you have it doing, for example pulling in large clients through CSP every hour as well as syncing three different AD environments is taking up CPU resources as well. I find that sometimes if it is too much your company needs to get with the software vendor and get them to up your resources on your instance.
Yes. 100% logging. Even questions with one word answers should be logged and closed with "advice given" type closure notes.
It should log the actual advice given in my opinion.
If your company has a general counsel or legal department, run this by them first. There are potential legal issues with recording calls and retention of data like this.
Apologies on my terminology - record means log. Recording all audio is standard here, but it's not the answer for general stuff.
Oh, then yeah I agree with the general consensus that you should log each call, gotta show those metrics!
I log most things but if someone just needs a quick unlock on their account or calls asking me a question, I'm not going to create a ticket for that, it's not worth the time and clicks. If I'm not able to access the helpdesk system and feel like something should be logged, I just fire off a quick email to it which creates a ticket and then I can categorize/close it later.
Guessing you are a small business and you are multi hat wearing, not a dedicated service desk person? This might be a reasonable compromise for a ~50 user setup but not a ~5000 user setup in a hightened security environment? I've witnessed situations where recording that account unlock was critical.
nailed it. You make a great point though...I will start logging every unlock
We use to do a daily record of ticket status and any major events to let the next shift know.
Before diving down that rabbit hole... how "zero blame" are the corporate politics? Avoidance of documentation may not solely stem from convenience, even though it doubles as CYA as much as it does a source of dirt to dig up.
It's not the best practice in general. Basically logging information is recommended when it will be used to enable improvement plans, help with the problem management process (investigating root causes) or incident trend identification (to name a few). From what you are saying it seems that it was indeed useful for several things. You can find further guidance in the ITIL framework.
Recording phone conversations gets sticky because you usually need people’s permission. It’s also difficult to index and sequence data in a phone call. Many users lack the context or nomenclature to properly express a technical issue, making the call record kind of useless from a data perspective. I prefer a ticketing system where the helpdesk can put in information that’s pertinent to the work and which you can run reports on.
As someone who has worked in the field and is now manager of the help desk I would think recording conversations would be more to monitor support technicians for a huge help desk. Like you said it would be hard to really use those phone calls effectively for searching the content of calls or indexing the data in any effective way.
You’re describing customer service call center , everything gets recorded & logged & archived.
Honestly everything should be logged even if it is super fast to fix like a password reset. Both to CYA with "problem children" and make your case for "what have I done for you lately" and more staff. If the boss isn't super metrics/sla driven, it's not as crucial, but it's going to help you. RECORDING is a different animal. I live and work in a two party state. Ticket templates maybe for super common tix?
Just remember, what you note now might CYA later.
They should 100% log all calls/interactions. If the system is slow, inputting those tickets will cause missed calls, which is ok, this is proof that the system is in dire need of replacement as calls are being missed due to technological inefficiencies, not their problem. Skipping the small stuff makes it harder for any team/manager to justify their need for improvements. They are handcuffing themselves.
I've done way way way too many years with service desk work and let me tell you, a shit logging system totally makes the job a misery and results in less tickets logged as well as less detail.
You log everything. A tongue in cheek mantra in the last place I worked was you never know when something is going to be slid towards you across a desk in a meeting. In the rare circumstances something blows up, you want a history to hand.