The Perfect Help Desk Ticket

Perfect – accurate, exact, or correct in every detail. As a society, we are always striving for perfection. The perfect date, the perfect car, or shall I dare say it, the perfect application. We strive for perfection because we believe it will make life easier. Here at South River Technologies, we strive for perfection every day. In my role as Technical Support Engineer, I want to provide accurate and correct advice to resolve your issue, but in order to do that, I need accurate and exact information.

In order to provide the best customer service, here is a step-by-step guide on creating the perfect Help Desk ticket. If you follow these steps, you will probably get your tickets resolved much faster, freeing you up to handle other technical issues. But before I show you how to submit the Perfect Help Desk ticket, let me give you an example of a bad Help Desk ticket, so you can see the difference.

Bad Ticket:

“I came in this morning and everything is down, so no one can log in even after a restart. Please help.”

There are so many problems with this ticket. Let’s start with the introduction. It’s imperative that you always open a Help Desk ticket with your name and contact information. What operating system are you using? Include Service Pack level and if it’s 32 versus 64-bit. What software?  Is it our Titan product, or maybe WebDrive? Include the version, for example, “Titan MFT ver. 7.11 build 879 with the WebUI.” This type of information will help narrow down the scope so I can begin to focus on what the issue could be. Now,  let’s get to the heart of the ticket: the description of the problem. “No one can log in even after a restart” is too vague. For example, if this is a Titan issue, did you restart the service or did you restart the Windows server? How do your users log in? Are they using  Active Directory accounts? Or are Native accounts maintained in the Titan database? This will allow us to focus more accurately on the problem and to quickly find a solution.

Here are the steps:

1) introduce yourself,

2) include as much information as possible about all of the equipment involved in the problem, for example, “Titan MFT ver. 7.11 build 879 on Windows 2003 (32bit) server SP 2 with latest Microsoft Security patches behind a Cisco ASA 5500 firewall”,

3) a clear description of the problem, for example, “after a power failure in our building, our Domain server rebooted and now the Titan service doesn’t appear to be loading,” and

4) include your location; SRT has a presence all over the world, so please include your location and time zone and good contact information, so we know when it’s best to reach you.

Now that we are armed with our 4 steps, let’s re-submit the ticket.

Perfect Ticket:

“I’m John Smith with Widget World in Wichita, Kansas and last night a Lightening storm came through and knocked out the power to our building. Unfortunately, our UPS failed and we were unable to gracefully shut-down our LAN. This morning upon arrival, all 200 of our Domain users (we are running Windows 2003 AD server SP 2 32bit with security patches up to May of 2009) could not login to our Titan MFT server with WebUI, it is version 7.11 build 879. We have an FTP (in PASV mode behind a CISCO ASA 5500 firewall) and a SFTP server configured both using ADSI Authentication, and they both appear offline as well. We did restart the Active Directory server but still no one can log in. For your convenience, I have attached a Titan debug level log taken after the server came back online for you to review. This is urgent and you can reach me on my Blackberry @ (222) 555-9033 (CST). Thank you.”

We may not have the perfect car, the perfect commute, or even the perfect kid, but we can have the Perfect Ticket!