Ticketing Systems and Issue Resolution Workflow (IT-09-02) - Boutique Standards

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Ticketing Systems and Issue Resolution Workflow (IT-09-02)

MANAGED STANDARD  REVISED: JULY 1, 2025 | REVIEWED: JULY 01, 2025

As organizations scale, they need a means of managing employee issues outside of

emailing and calling IT departments with requests, or approaching IT professionals
to explain the issue in person. Ticketing software takes all service requests and
converts them into a single point of contact. These ticketing systems can store and
manage all HR, legal, IT, and other queries. Other benefits and functionalities
include:

 Improved employee communication and satisfaction

 Increased IT productivity
 Relevant, accurate, and consistent information all available in a single location
 Access to a centralized repository
 Self-service options
 Real-time data for reporting and analytics

Components of IT ticketing systems

Effective IT ticketing systems incorporate many different components. These may
include the following:
 A centralized requests repository
 24/7 accessibility
 Ticket creation via web, mobile, virtual agents, service portals, and more
 Automated responses and updates
 Communications tracking between employees and agents
 Employee visibility into status of requests
 Data for analytics and reporting

Going beyond ticketing with ITSM

A robust ticketing system is an essential element of employee service and support,

but it is still only one element. To provide employees with resilient solutions and
amazing experiences, you need to go beyond ticketing.

IT service management (ITSM) is a framework that focuses on employee needs,

offering planning, delivery, and support of IT services through integrated people,
process, and technology. ITSM stresses continual improvement, with IT support
delivered as a service. Compared to traditional ticketing systems, ITSM is more
inclusive. It describes the processes and tools IT teams use to manage all IT
services, end to end. It helps ensure that employees' issues are being resolved
quickly and effectively, while also aligning IT goals with overall business goals
throughout an organization.

In other words, ITSM is the power to put information technology fully to work to
benefit your employees and your business.

ITSM vs. ticketing systems

There are many ways that an effective ticketing system benefits your organization,
or any organization faced with a large number of IT help requests across various
channels. The most advanced ticketing systems provide options for tracking tickets
through their life cycles from request to resolution, and may incorporate automation
to assist IT support teams in managing large volumes of help requests. But where
ticketing stops, ITSM steps in, offering complete IT solutions for ticketing and more.

And with ServiceNow, ITSM becomes an essential tool for total digital transformation
for any organization.

Benefits of ServiceNow ITSM

ITSM promotes complete digital transformation, allowing organizations to increase

visibility, scalability, productivity, and efficiency along with employee satisfaction.
It’s an agile approach to providing IT services, combining the advantages of optimal
accessibility and mobility with advanced, AI-backed automation, delivering global IT
services on a single, unified, cloud-native platform.
For employees who are in need of ticketing and support solutions, the benefits are
clear:

 Omnichannel support
Rather than forcing employees to communicate via one or two designated
channels, or even allowing them to use a range of different channels,
ServiceNow ITSM provides a true, fully integrated omnichannel solution. No
matter how the employee wishes to reach out for support, all interactions
occur within a single, unified system. All relevant data is collected and
available in the system itself, and conversations can continue uninterrupted
through any and all communication channels, and even through multiple
contacts.
 Improved IT-service effectiveness
Fully cloud native and accessible at any time, from any location, using any
authorized device, ServiceNow ITSM empowers employees to receive
essential IT support whenever and wherever they need it. IT agents can
easily coordinate on cases, and AI-based virtual agents, chatbots, and service
portals provide employees with self-service options to locate solutions at the
push of a button. ITSM likewise provides a clear picture of available IT
services, and direction on who to get the most out of them for more-effective
IT support.
 Increased satisfaction
Faster, more accurate resolutions with minimal effort and fewer hurdles
means that employees can get back to doing their jobs more quickly. And
with ServiceNow ITSM, fully aligned business goals help support employee
productivity across the entire organization. This means increased employee
satisfaction, for a happier, more engaged workforce.

What is ServiceNow Ticketing Tool?

 Solving an issue can cost you loads of time, effort, and money in the IT sector.
To prevent all of them, ServiceNow has introduced its Ticketing Tool. Resolving
issues in IT is not a piece of cake and can cause a disturbance in everyday IT
processes. ServiceNow Ticketing Tool works in a well-organized stepwise
process to resolve users’ issues.

Each and every well-organized IT process works in a stage-wise manner and

ServiceNow is not different from any of them. The ServiceNow Ticketing Tool
works in a 3-step process, in which, firstly an issue is reported, then its managed
in the best possible way. In the final step, it gets resolved with the mental
capability of highly skilled professionals and advanced computing systems. This
is the complete working structure of this tool, and now, let us get some deep
knowledge about it in the below-given points.

Learn more at Servicenow ITSM Tool

How does the ServiceNow ticketing tool work?

As we have already mentioned above, ServiceNow Ticketing Tool works in a

three-step process. Its well-arranged manner of working provides a better user
experience as well as quicker responses. You can get a detailed description of
all its stages in the below-given points to understand it more deeply. For making
it a bit easy, let's take an example of a broken phone in your office and its
lifecycle with ServiceNow. Kindly take a look at these points shown below:

Reporting an issue

It is the first step in this process, in which an issue gets reported in the system
for further process. Now according to the example, you have a broken phone in
your office and you have to fix this up via ServiceNow. Now, to report this issue
you have a total number of 4 ways, which can be seen via the following points:

 Via creating an incident directly in ServiceNow.

 Via sending an email to the company’s official id (i.e. instancename@service-
now.com).
 Via reaching out to the Service Desk directly by a phone call or walk-in.
 Via the creation of a new incident by reaching out to the service portal or
service catalog at the ServiceNow homepage.
 Automatically, via regular automated analysis of phone system logs.
 Via ServiceNow directly if any malfunctioning is created.

Apart from this, that issue can also be reported by a partner, but only if the
facility is arranged by the company.
 Managing an issue

After reporting the issue, it goes to the second phase termed as ‘Managing’.
This process has three steps. You can check them out in the below-mentioned
points:

 Assessment: Under this, admins analyze the urgency and impact of the issue,
after which, the system automatically sets its priority level.
 Assignment: After the assessment, the reported incident goes to the highly
skilled technical specialists via email. These specialists take the bridle from
here.
 Handling: The support team then performs necessary operations for the
restoration of the usual workflow back again.

Furthermore, ServiceNow also provides you a facility to track the status of the
Service Desk’s activities for our issue. Apart from this, if any miracle happens
and your phone starts automatically without any assistance from the Service
Desk, you can easily cancel the reported incident.

Resolving an issue

Now, this is a really interesting part as ServiceNow doesn’t allow the tech team
to just hit the ‘Resolve’ button and close the case. The tech team will need to fill
up a form, or we can say input resolution information. For this, they will have to
state many important things including, who resolved it, when it got resolved,
and a resolution (i.e. not solved, permanently solved, solve through a
workaround, etc).

If the issue gets completely resolved, then you will be asked to shut it down, and
if you don’t respond, the team will do it automatically after a fixed period of
time. Unfortunately, if the problem doesn’t get resolved, escalation rules take
the charge. According to these rules, the system notifies the inactivity team
regarding this issue within a particular solving process. Inactivity monitors then
examine every step taken to solve the incident very closely and SLAs (Service
Level Agreements) track the time spent on the incident. This entire process has
been developed just to offer you high-quality service.

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Major Issues in ServiceNow ticketing

ServiceNow is undeniably a great IT Management Platform and has given a

spectacular Ticketing Tool to the world. With the reference of time, the company
has evolved all of their tools in a very smart manner to be the Greek gods in
their niches. However, the users have faced some issues while using ServiceNow
Ticketing. The company must have taken appropriate actions on them, but
getting them through can make you aware of the possible problems while using
it. Kindly take a look at the below-given points
 Accounting for time off (i.e. vacation, off-duty, etc) as well as for the time of
resolving an issue.
 Less interactive User Interface.
 Limitations in reporting functionalities, as it is a bit complex to create reports in
it.
 Unannounced changes in UI/UX create confusion.
 Immature searchability.
 Not able to perform smoothly if having multiple owners.

These are some issues faced by the users of the ServiceNow Ticketing Tool till
now. However, these are the researched issues and must have been taken care
of by the company itself.

Type of tickets in ServiceNow

To get rid of issues, the users initially need to understand them more deeply and
differentiate them as per their categories to work upon them more efficiently. It
is a bit logical and needs to be taken care of while detecting any issue. For
example, if we use ‘Food’ to refer to everything we eat, it will undoubtedly
become a bit confusing to detect what we mean by it as there are, bread,
noodles, pasta, chicken, mutton, and many other food items. They are all
different from each other and we make them in different ways. The same goes
with the problems, and the ServiceNow team has differentiated them into 4
categories. Kindly check them out in the following points given below:

Incident Management:

These tickets are used for unplanned and sudden interruptions in an IT service
delivery.

Problem Management:

These tickets are used for the root cause of a number of incidents. Problem
Management focuses on the main reason or problem behind many similar
incidents. For example a server issue.

Request Management:

These tickets are used for smaller requests when you need something from IT
support.

Change Management:

As its name suggests, these tickets are used if you want to make any change in
your IT environment. In simple words, you can use these tickets if you want to
add, remove, or modify anything under the hood of your IT services. For eg:
replacing a legacy system.
 Initially, it is a bit difficult for everyone to differentiate between a problem and
an incident. Let’s get it more clear, Incident Management is entirely focused on
resolving a specific issue and restoring the usual flow of business as quickly as
possible. Whereas, Problem Management revolves around finding the root cause
of similar incidents and resolving them to prevent future mishappening.

So, if your ticketing system is not able to differentiate between an Incident and
a Problem, it is a serious threat for all of your company’s IT operations. If a
system ignores the root cause of similar incidents, and they keep coming, again
and again, it can simply affect the efficiency of your IT services.

We can understand this more clearly with the help of a general life example. If a
person has terrible health issues, then the support of some random medicines
will not help for a long time. The issues will arise again after passing out the
effect of medicines. In order to make him/her completely alright, a specialist
doctor will need to examine him/her deeply so that the main problem (like weak
eyesight for headache, Typhoid for continuous loose motions, etc.) can be
resolved. Here, ServiceNow works as a Doctor to cure out the main problem in
your working process in Problem Management.

How to manage incident tickets in ServiceNow?

If you’re working for a big organization, then the number of tickets can
eventually face an exponential increment. In this case, you will have to take the
responsibility of handling all of them. The lifecycle of an incident can be seen
below:
New Incident > Assignment > Work in Progress > Pending >
Resolved/Closed/Cancelle

Here, we are guiding you on how to manage the ticket in ServiceNow during its
entire lifecycle. To manage an incident ticket under the ServiceNow Ticketing
System, you can simply go through the following points shown below:

Creating a new Incident Ticket:

To create a new Incident ticket, you can simply follow the below-mentioned
points to get through the entire process without any hustle:

 Select the ‘Incident’ module on the left sidebar and click ‘Create New’.
 Fill all the columns appropriately. (Note: Mandatory columns are showcased as a
red box).
 Click the ‘Save and Exit’ or ‘Save’ button located at the header bar and below
the vendor ticketing fields.
 Moving the Ticket in ‘Assigned’ State:

To get this process done, kindly take a look at the following points:

 Select the right ‘Assignment Group’ and ‘Assigned to’ precisely.

 Fill up all the required information.
 Click ‘Save and Exit’ or ‘Save’
Note: You are always allowed to change the incident state that is to be
assigned.
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Moving the Ticket into ‘Work in Progress State:

To make this task done, you can apply these below-mentioned points:

 Simply change the Incident State to the ‘Work in Progress' state.

 Click ‘Save and Exit’ or ‘Save’.
 Record tasks performed in the ‘Additional Comments’ section till the incident
remains in this state.
Moving a Ticket into ‘Pending’ State:

For this, you just need to change the Incident state to ‘Pending’ and update the
comment section with the reason for pending.

Moving a Ticket into ‘Resolved’ State:

In this section, you will have to follow the given instructions:

 Change the Incident State to ‘Resolved’.

 Enter the necessary and appropriate information in the ‘Resolution Notes’ and
‘Resolution Code’ sections.
 Click ‘Save and Exit’.
Moving a Ticket into ‘Closed’ State:

This is an automated process, in which resolved tickets move to the closed state
after 24 hours.

Moving a Ticket into ‘Cancelled’ state:

For this, you will have to change the Incident State to ‘Cancelled’ and then just
click ‘Save and Exit’.

In this way, an Incident Ticket can be managed in the ServiceNow Ticketing

System. Apart from this, you also get many additional options such as attaching
configuration items, watch lists, etc. These additional facilities to help in
managing incident tickets can simply be seen in the help manual offered by
ServiceNow.
Here we have showcased all the essential information related to ServiceNow
Technology and its Ticketing system. You can easily get through it to
understand it more deeply before heading on with it.