The tools used by IT employees must work in perfect condition so that the company can deliver the best experience for users. For this, the ideal is to rely on incident management.
Briefly, incidents are events that interrupt the quality of service, such as computer malfunctions and servers down. While they cannot always be avoided, they must be quickly resolved.
Therefore, good incident management is necessary. In this article, we'll talk better about this subject.
What is incident management?
Incident management is part of an ITIL process whose objective is to restore the proper functioning of IT tools, quickly solving the failures that have occurred.
The ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), it stipulates the best practices of the IT environment, taking into account maintenance, infrastructure and operation.
Which means that it allows IT processes to become more efficient, aligning them with the organization's objectives, controlling costs and offering better services to customers. Therefore, incident management should be based on ITIL guidelines.
For IT managers, it is essential to avoid the occurrence of incidents, but if they do happen, it is necessary to resolve them in a way that affects the performance of activities as little as possible, reducing the chances of damage to the company.
It is at this point that incident management comes in, making the service offered to be of quality and continuing to guarantee credibility with consumers.
If the occurrence of incidents is frequent, this will damage the company's relationship with customers, as they will be dissatisfied and even may migrate to the competition.
How to manage incidents efficiently?
It's not enough to know what incident management is without knowing how to apply it correctly in your company, right? So, know that there are 6 main steps in carrying out this process. Next, understand better what they are!
Detection
The first step in managing incidents is knowing how to detect them. For this, having a call control system is essential, allowing the history of calls to be properly registered.
This way, it will be possible to standardize procedures in relation to incidents. It is important that there are different communication channels, but all are integrated into the ticketing system.
Classification
After detecting the incident, the next step is to know how to classify it, which will help establish the direction for the solution to the problem.
In this sense, the classification should be based on the category (the tool, such as software or hardware) and the priority (impact caused and the urgency of the solution) of the incident.
Diagnosis
The third stage refers to the diagnosis of the incident, that is, the identification of what exactly it is, how it arose and what are the possible solutions.
In this case, the knowledge base plays an important role in guiding the agents to ask the right questions to the users, making it possible to solve the problem according to previous experiences or transferring the call to the next level.
Resolution
As you can imagine, the resolution step is related to solving the incident according to the diagnosis performed. Therefore, the previous steps are essential for incident management to reach this stage.
Closure
Moving towards the end of the process is the closure, phase in which the incident is archived with important data that can be accessed in the future. In this process, the user is communicated about the resolution of the incident.
Monitoring
The last step in incident management is monitoring if the incident is not resolved on the first call. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a workflow that allows the user to monitor the progress of the service.
It is necessary to have access to the measures that were taken in order to solve the problem and the estimated forecast of final resolution, and so, the call center must be aware of this.
3 tips to avoid making mistakes in this process
Even if you are knowledgeable about incident management, it is possible that you will make one mistake or another in this process, as it goes through different stages. To avoid this kind of situation, let's give you 3 tips below!
1. Identify the demands that most require support
As you begin to create the database regarding incidents, you will discover which cases generate the greatest demand for support and, consequently, work on them, with the objective of reducing these events.
This way, it is possible to draw up a continuous improvement plan, which will help to reduce incidents that take longer to be resolved or are more frequent in calls.
2. Monitor the IT infrastructure
In order to manage incidents, it is essential that you have knowledge about the infrastructure and systems of the IT environment.
For this, you must rely on monitoring and, if any changes of incident are found, employees already receive the alert. This way, it is possible to resolve a failure before it becomes an incident.
3. Avoid calls considered unnecessary
Does your company receive many calls considered unnecessary on a daily basis that end up taking up your employees' time?
If this issue is identified, it is important to create strategies so that this does not happen. You can, for example, create a “frequently asked questions” tab on your website in order to answer the questions that appear the most in the tickets and are easily resolved.
Another option is to rely on chatbots to optimize services that have simpler demands. These strategies will help not only users but also contributors.
As you could see, incident management reveals itself as a fundamental care for your company to continue delivering the best services to customers, without affecting the productivity of employees, especially in the IT area.
Although they cannot always be avoided, incidents need to be resolved quickly so as not to compromise your company's reputation. Therefore, it is important to establish processes that show employees how to act during these events.
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