With a proven 6 step Help Desk ticket classification methodology such as CREATE, companies can Build a Help Desk Ticket Classification scheme that increases ticket trend reporting efficiency, enhance the ticket escalation process and reduce overall support costs. Every Help Desk needs a ticket classification scheme to handle the customer’s issues when they contact the Help Desk for support. Proper ticket classification of an issue when a Help Desk ticket is created enables the Help Desk Agent to sort the issue into support buckets. These buckets will allow knowledge to be presented to the Help Desk agent when trying to provide proper support, enable proper routing of escalated tickets and allow trend reporting of ticket types.

1. Help Desk Ticket Categories
CREATE Help Desk ticket classification instruction
from BuildaHelpDesk.com

2. Why you need Help Desk Ticket Categories
• Improve ticket trend reporting
• Reduce support costs
• Improve First Call Resolution (FCR) by matching knowledge
solutions
• Ensure proper escalation routing of tickets
• Quickly identify service outages
• Improve your Problem Management process

3. The CREATE method
• Collect – Sample of 3 months of Help Desk ticket data.
• Review – Define your review ticket classification criteria.
• Evaluate – Apply your new Help Desk ticket classification scheme
to your previous ticket data.
• Arrange – Help Desk ticket separation by categories.
• Training – Ensure your staff understands the new Help Desk ticket
classification scheme.
• Execute – Implement your new Help Desk ticket classification
scheme into production.

4. Collect 6 months of Help Desk ticket data.
• Export 6 months of your current ticket data into a spreadsheet. It will
hold a wealth of useful data.
• Ticket number
• Ticket title or short description
• Ticket summary
• Created and resolution dates
• Ticket classification
• Ticket detail
• Ticket resolution

5. Review – Define your review criteria.
• Your goal in this step is to create a high level way to soft the
tickets into logical groups.
• We recommend a Help Desk ticket classification scheme that is
based on a 3 tier structure - Type / Service / Product Name.
• Type - Top level Help Desk ticket classification such as, Incident Resolution,
Service Request, Questions/Training.
• Service – Second level Help Desk ticket classification such as Desktop,
Printing, Mobile Device, Infrastructure, ect.
• Product name – Third level Help Desk ticket classification such as MS Office,
iPhone, Laserjet, Email server

6. Evaluate - Adding your proposed 3 tier
classification structure to previous ticket data.
• Review each Help Desk ticket description and summary.
• Have the evaluation team decide is it something that is broken
(incident resolution), a move add change (Service Request), or a
training question to assign the correct tier 1 classification.
• Next the review team should decide what tier 2 service this ticket
fits under.
• Finally identify the product name in the tier 3 field.

7. Arrange - Help Desk ticket separation by
categories
• The arrange step is a very important final review process to
ensure the correct Help Desk ticket classification.
• Should the tier 1 incident resolution be separated into incident resolution
and security classifications?
• Are any of the tier 2 groups over or under populated? If so you may consider
separating or combining the classification into evenly distributed groups.
• Are your tier 3 classifications too high of level. Example are you defining
tickets with the tier 3 classification of Adobe or should you separate these
into smaller tier 3 classifications such as Adobe Professional, Dream Weaver
and Flash?

8. Training – Ensure your Help Desk Agents understand
the new ticket classification scheme.
• Implementing a new Help Desk ticket classification scheme
without properly training the support staff would create
confusion, inefficiencies and result in implementation problems.
• Help Desk Agents should receive access to a Help Desk application
test environment with the new classification structure
implemented.
• We recommend to have quick reference charts available at each
Help Desk Agent workspace to refer to the charts as needed.

9. Execute – Implement your new Help Desk
ticket classification scheme into production.
• Remember the Help Desk Agent has limited information during the
initial contact with the customer, so keep it based on what the
customer can tell you and not the root cause.
• Ensure the Help Desk ticket classification scheme is quick and
intuitive for the Help Desk Agent to create a ticket.
• Initially run reports daily to ensure the new ticket classifications
are following expectations.

10. For more Help Desk information
For more information on Help Desk
ticket categories, ITIL, or Help Desk
processes – Visit Build a Help Desk
http://buildahelpdesk.com
Thank You!