We all know that whenever users have problems, they call the Helpdesk. Those that have worked on a Helpdesk, for any period of time, all have war stories about experiences with users who are not so technical. Being the primary interface with the general user population, the Helpdesk becomes that critical link between the users and the rest of IT.
Every organization structures their Helpdesk differently, but the first tier typically does password resetting, account unlocking, and basic troubleshooting. I believe one of the more important functions this group provides is the triage of problems before escalating to a different tier or IT team. This triage alleviates some of the more basic tasks from the other teams in IT, but it also helps to get the problem resolved more efficiently by transferring the request (via ticket) to a team that is more capable of resolving the issue.
In my previous $dayjob I was on the network team where we worked on projects and were the last tier of support with regard to network issues. We received plenty of "network problems". We would also receive many tickets with details that were vague. Most of the time these tickets only contained details like "Outlook/Internet Explorer is slow" or "User can't access ___". These types of tickets became very frustrating to our team because we were doing the triage. After we triaged the issue, we typically had to transfer the ticket to a different team for resolution. This would increase the time it took to get the problem resolved and created frustration within our team. Also, the user had to deal with someone else within IT that could not resolve their problem and then wait for another team to get back with them.
Our solution was to come up with scripts that the Helpdesk would have to run through before transferring a ticket to our group. For example, if the problem appeared to be a slow connection to the Internet or an application, then the Helpdesk agent would do something like the following (and put the details in the ticket) from the user's PC:
-Ping the default gateway
-Ping a core network device (across the user's WAN connection)
-Ping the application server in question
-Ping 4.2.2.2 or 8.8.8.8
-Include a trace route to the application
-Identify all applications having problems
-Time the application response from the user's PC and their PC
-Include in the ticket any additional testing that was done
How does your organization handle the first level triage? What details must be included when transferring tickets? Do you or your organization's Helpdesk have scripts that have to be run through? Do you have another solution?