Scenarios for creating tickets using Smart IT

Using BMC Remedy with Smart IT, you can create tickets to help record and track requests that are created through your help desk. As you work with the ticket, Smart IT suggests related tickets and knowledge articles related to other, similar tickets that can help you to quickly resolve the current issue. The social component of ticket tracking also lets you work in real time with colleagues and people who are affected by the ticket to diagnose and resolve them.

After you create an ticket, you can also use Smart IT to keep the ticket information up-to-date by either changing the information that it contains or by adding new details about the work done or the resolution. Updating tickets has information about changing and adding information in an existing ticket.

The following information is provided in this topic:

• Use Smart Recorder for creating tickets (recommended, all clients)
• Scenario — Creating a ticket from the Create New menu (universal client only) 

Use Smart Recorder for creating tickets (recommended, all clients)

Using the Smart Recorder is the recommended approach for creating tickets for everyone in your organization.

Smart Recorder uses a free form text entry field to help you focus on what the customer is saying, instead of filling out out fields in a structured form. This way of creating a ticket helps you to capture information in real time, directly from the customer and in their own words. Smart Recorder helps you to create tickets of all kinds more quickly and with greater accuracy. 

Integration with phone systems

Click here for information about integrating Smart IT with phone systems.

Scenario — Creating a ticket from the Create New menu (universal client only)

Using Smart IT, you can also create tickets from the Create New menu, as illustrated in the following scenario for creating an incident request. The Create New menu uses a more traditional, form based way to create tickets.

Using the Create New menu, you can create the following tickets and events:

• incident request
• work order
• change request
• broadcast

In this scenario, Francie Stafford, the second level service desk agent creates an incident ticket in the universal client. Francie does not often create incident tickets and is not comfortable using the Smart Recorder, even though it is a faster and more accurate way to create tickets. Instead, she chooses the Incident option from the Create New menu, and uses the more traditional forms base approach to creating incident requests.

1. Francie receives an escalation related to a request for help with a complex configuration issue for Greg Jones, who is the Director of H.R.  
2. Francie opens the relevant incident ticket in the universal client and notices that although the ticket is for a problem with Greg's machine, Marilee Weegou, who is Greg's executive assistant, is listed as the contact person.
3. Francie calls Marilee to gather some information about Greg's computer and while they are talking, Marilee mentions that Greg encountered the Blue Screen of Death earlier in the day, when he tried to restart his laptop. 
4. Francie offers to create an incident ticket about the Blue Screen of Death problem so that someone can follow up on the issue. 
5. To capture the details of the issue, Francie opens Smart IT and clicks Create New, and then selects Incident.
6. Francie starts recording the ticket information outlined by the fields on the form. She is sure to record Greg's name as the affected customer and clicks Add Person so she can add Marilee as a second contact person. 
7. Francie looks for a template by typing Computer reboot in the Template field, but the auto complete feature does not find a match for this phrase. Next, Francie clicks Browse All Templates to open the template browser. The Template Browser shows a list of the most recently used templates, however, Francie still does not see a match. Next, in the Template Browser, under Select a category to browse, she clicks the drop down list to see a high-level list of template categories. Francie selects Software and then clicks the middle drop down list to select from the next tier of template categories where she selects Operating Systems. From the third drop down list, she selects Blue Screen of Death upon restart, which she highlights and then clicks Save. 

8. The selected template auto-fills a number of fields on the screen, such as: Incident Title, Impact, Priority, Incident Status, Operational Categorization, Product Categorization, and so on.

   Notes

   The fields that are auto-filled by a template depend on how the template is defined. All templates do not necessarily auto-fill the same fields.

   You can change the selected template at any time. If you do, the auto-filled fields are overridden with values specified by the new template. If Francie did not find an appropriate template, she could click Cancel in the Select Template panel and then manually type information into the remaining fields. She would then continue to work through the incident ticket as described in this scenario.

9. Francie moves on to the Affected Service field and starts to type Infra (because the business service type is Infrastructure Operations). As the system detects what she is typing, she sees a list of possible matches from the business services already in the system. Francie clicks Infrastructure Operations in the list of suggestions and moves on to the Affected Asset field. Again, as Francie starts to type the model of laptop affected by the incident, the system suggests a list of matches from which Francie makes a selection.

10. Because Greg's laptop is an asset that actually belongs to another company within the multi-tenant environment, Francie selects Use a different company to select categories. From the Company drop down list, Francie selects the company that owns Greg's laptop. Because Francie changed the company used to select the categories, the system cleared the Operational Category and Product Category fields, so Francie must select new operational and the product categories. She clicks inside the Operational Category field and presses Enter. She then selects the correct categorization from of the list generated by Smart IT. Francie then clicks inside the Product Category field and selects a new product category the same way.

    Note

    When you change the company as Francie did in this step, the change affects only the company that is used for Operational and Product categorizations, it does not change the Affected Company, which is tied to Greg's People record.

11. Francie leaves the Assignee selection at the default setting: Will be auto-assigned so that the ticket is assigned to the correct group, based on the configured assignment rules. Alternatively, if Francie knew which support group was best suited to resolve the incident, she could have unselected the Auto-assign check box and manually selected the support group. 

12. Francie then adds notes to the incident request in the Incident Description field.

13. Francie clicks Save Ticket and the system creates the ticket, routing the incident request to the support group for assignment.

Relating the current ticket to other tickets

Information on other tickets or entities can help you to diagnose the ticket you are currently working on. You might also know of other existing tickets that in some way are related to the ticket that you are working on. Perhaps the ticket you are working was caused by another incident, or the incident that you are working on has caused another incident. When these types of relationships exist, you can create links among tickets so that others who are working with you to resolve the issue are aware of the broader context in which they are working, or can view information that can be helpful to them.

To relate a ticket to other tickets

1. Open the Related Items tab.

   Note

   If you are creating a new ticket, you must click Save Ticket to see the Related Items tab.

2. Click the +Related Item link. 
3. From the Item Type menu in the panel that slides into view, select the type of record that you want to link to.
4. In the Search field, enter information that will help to identify the specific record you want to link to. For example, type the ticket ID number or the ticket title.
5. Press or tap Enter.
6. Select the record that you want to link to from the list returned by the search.
7. Click Save.
   A reference to the linked record is added to the Related Items tab.

How administrators enable this scenario

The system administrators need to ensure that Incident Management templates are configured, and that the assignment rules are configured.

A few words about templates

Whenever possible, make sure you use a template to create the ticket, as suggested by the preceding use case. By using a  template to create tickets, the help desk analyst can gather information relevant to the ticket quickly, accurately, and completely. With the necessary information collected quickly, the help desk analyst can then move on to the job of resolving the issue within the time limits imposed by the service level agreement. If an appropriate template is not available, however, you can still create the ticket as otherwise described in the following use case.

Capturing ticket information accurately ensures that the help desk analyst can match the current record with previous, similar records to help resolve the ticket. By capturing all of the details for each ticket, you can later perform more meaningful reporting and analysis of help desk activity.

When using a standard template to create a ticket, the layout of the UI lets you concentrate first on gathering relevant information about the customer and the nature of the request. By identifying the key issues up front, the system itself can begin to proactively suggest ways to solve the issue.