Service Desk First Line or Front Line Support (The lost art of ticket triage)

I spent several years working on the second line at an award-winning service desk (18 years best hedge fund service desk).

The calibre of the Engineers was High, and I had to raise my game to keep up seriously. It took me six months to get the lay of the land and keep up. One of the reasons it took so long to hit the same number of ticket closures was that I avoided the quick win reset password and terminal session resets.

I was expected to do five to ten tickets a day. We had a third line who strolled in when he felt like it for a few days. The service desk manager busted him down to 1st line for the day, he closed sixteen tickets no password resets.

When I made the third Line in a team of four, I was the only one in one day. I closed thirty-third line tickets in a day, from paying close attention to that third line, who had been busted down to the first line for the day.

Getting to second or third line from the first line is easy with good mentoring, but it's a dog-eat-dog on a bad service desk, and knowledge sharing can be non-existent on a service desk, especially if the same few people are high ticket closers.

The service desk manager needs to enforce quality notes in ticket closure and share any quick fixes or tricks with the rest of the team.

I had a service desk manager raise the issue with the number of tickets I closed as a second line; he felt that the number should be the same as the first line or exceed the number.

I would attend the service desk show annually to learn about industry trends. The consensus was that the first line took the quick fix and volume of the tickets. The second line resolves about 3.5 Wintel tickets a day.

With a good continuous improvement process and all second-line ticket processes part of a knowledge base, 3.5 tickets a day can be exceeded with minimal effort.

This is where the third-line service desk is needed to document tickets so that any tickets that are not documented can be documented.

One of the key parts of increasing ticket closure in the second line is ticket triage. Ticket triage at speed is never taught to the first line, as everyone on the service desk sees it as common sense.

I have observed many first lines being ducted into a service desk without focus on triage; this skill makes or breaks a new first line.

So, after watching many painful inductions of first line, I created a one-hour workshop to teach the beautiful art of ticket triage.

A first line should follow the workflow and add all the information to the ticket when the user first calls if the ticket gets escalated to a second line. The second line can be fixed with the first contact as they have all the information and the possible fix from the knowledge base.

The worst thing a second line should do is ask what the problem is; this should be established when the ticket is raised.