Our service desk tool closes a ticket automatically when the requester has not replied for three working days. It is the supplier's recommended setting, and for people at head office it works well.
Most of our depot staff work four shifts on and four off. A night shift supervisor who reports a scanner fault at three in the morning on her last shift will not see our reply until she is back, five days later, by which point the ticket has closed with a polite note saying we assumed the problem was resolved. She then raises a new one, which starts at the back of the queue, or more often does not bother and borrows a scanner from the next bench.
We found this in June, when a regional manager sent me a list of faults his sites had reported more than once. When we checked, forty three percent of tickets raised by shift workers last year had been closed by the timer. The equivalent figure for office staff was nine percent. Our reports counted all of them as resolved inside target.
The rule itself was not wrong. It assumed that the person asking for help would be at work on the next working day, and for the people who configured it, that has always been true. Nobody on my team had ever looked at a depot rota, so nobody had noticed that for half of our users a gap of three working days is an ordinary weekend.
The timer now counts the requester's shifts rather than the calendar, using the rota feed from the workforce system, so a ticket waits for three of her working days, not ours. Where we have no rota, tickets from depot staff go to the site supervisor's queue before they can close. Closed by timer is reported as its own outcome, separately from resolved, and any fault reopened within a fortnight is linked to the original instead of becoming a fresh ticket. And the monthly service review now shows resolution by user group, so the depots can no longer look well served by accident.
Timer closures for shift workers are down to about one ticket in eight.
Silence from somebody on a day off is not an answer. Our settings had been treating it as one for years.
– Serguey Shinder
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