Show additional info in service desk portal (or discourage submitter to lift up priority)

[Bogdan Slusarczyk]

Hi,

When customers create a ticket in the portal they choose a priority. It is used later to choose proper SLA. Problem is that our customers often use higher priority than justified. My idea is to show additional question just before submitting a ticket, with question like "are you sure that the chosen priority is right?" or maybe with some additional priorities' explanation. Do you know a plugins which could be helpful? or maybe you have some other ideas how to help submitter to choose right priority?

Regards,
Bogdan

[Joseph Chung Yin · Accepted solution]

@Bogdan Slusarczyk -

Here is an simplest option that you can do by adding help-text associated with the Priority field in your portal's request type form.  This way, you can at least provide guidance to your customers when selecting the appropriate value.

The good part is that you don't need to add additional fields to the form and keep every simple.

Here is how -

1. Access your request type form and add in the help-text

NOTE - you need to enter in the help-text with following syntax to create the line breaks - "\\".  It is actually a single line of entry

Example - Please select the appropriate value: \\ Critical - means xxx \\ High - means yyy \\ Medium - means zzz \\ Low - means aaa.  This entry provides you with the line break setup.

This is what you will see in your portal UI -

If you want to bold certain word(s), just surround your word(s) with the "*" symbol.  Example - 

Please select the appropriate value: \\ *Critical*- means xxx \\ *High* - means yyy \\ *Medium* - means zzz \\ *Low* - means aaa

Hope this helps.

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

Jira/JSM Functional Lead, Global Infrastructure Applications Team

Viasat Inc.

[Bogdan Slusarczyk]

Thank you Joseph for sharing this!

[Callum Carlile _Automation Consultants_]

Hi @Bogdan Slusarczyk 

Within the request form settings of the portal, you could always add a brief description of how the priorities should be set, or instead you could add the 'are you sure' type message here.

Another option is that you could create a custom field with the priority options in and present this to the user, then once they have raised the request, the service desk agents could review this and set the actual priority field tied to the SLAs. Or perhaps instead of having separate fields, you could just introduce an additional step in your workflow where your agents have the change to amend the priority before the SLAs tied to the field begin.

In my experience, users will always add a priority higher than required in order for their request to be bumbed to the top of a queue, so having this separation of 'what the user thinks the priority is' and 'what the agents state the priority actually is' can be quite helpful.

[Bogdan Slusarczyk]

"...users will always add a priority higher than required in order for their request to be bumbed to the top of a queue..." - so very true :)

We do have a step to validate priority by support agents. Problem is that higher priority requires shorter reaction time (this is part of contract), which involves agents needlessly for example in the middle of the night.