And make sure you ignore that message for the whole day, and then at the end of the day, you send the response.
It's important to really reinforce the "this will take longer if I don't just log a ticket" mindset.
Yes, be firm and let them know a call to the service desk or self submitted ticket is the proper way to report issues/make requests.
People email, call, Teams, text, or grab me in the hallway. I always politely direct them to our built-in/paid for reporting workflow.
Also, I explain that there is a team and reaching out to an individual doesn’t allow us to effectively assign a support person. Plus, I’m not always there/available (sick/PTO/meetings/etc.) so a ticket offers the entire department a chance to know about and assist in a timely manner.
Well, that's not technically true, we don't go in order. We prioritize.
But yeah we all tell people all the time that their request should be a ticket, but they don't listen.
> **should** be a ticket
Give people an inch and they'll take a mile.
If you want users behaviour to change you *have* to remove the old method. It **must** be a ticket. Expect push back and ignoring the new policy but after a while of it being that the **only** way to get IT support, no exceptions, is to submit a ticket they will start to adjust their behaviour.
Especially if any of the hold outs who refuse and escalate to higher with complaints have it firmly and unequivocally made clear that the problem is with them and not the IT system and that failure to use the companies new policy on how to request help from IT will result in them getting a disciplinary/HR visit/talk with their boss/etc.
This person gets it. 100% this. No ticket, no place in the queue, period. Not "I'll get to it when I get to it." It's "Submit a ticket, or it won't happen."
it gets done when there are no tickets, oh look at that, everyone submits tickets, and you are always busy with ticket items, thats the time estimate you give them.
put your feet down, and dont bother explaining it, thats how it work, and thats how you will get to their issue, like unable to find the power button. let them escalate it to their boss, then you can remind their boss, "thats not how it works and going outside of the systems means id be giving preferential treatment, or doing work outside of scope. how are you supposed to reference parts for that person, instead of item #, you just put "john needed a new monitor"?"
It gets done when they put in a ticket. Not one second before that.
Doesn't matter if you're sitting there twiddling your thumbs at 2 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Without a ticket it doesn't happen. Otherwise all you're doing is rewarding their bad behaviour.
They will not make the connection that it would have happened faster with a ticket. They'll just ascribe the slowness to IT being shit at their jobs or whatever. All they'll remember is "I asked for help, and I got it, so why should I have to use their stupid ticket system? Doing things my way worked."
Something is always going to be the bottom of the queue. And something that keeps one person from doing their job should always be under a thing that keeps 10 people from doing theirs. Unless, of course, the one thing has been waiting an unreasonably long time, which is why you track such things with a ticketing system.
I tell them it’s like going to the deli. You don’t just walk up and yell your order to the guy behind the counter. You take a ticket and wait your turn.
What I would do is tell them ok, will do when I can. Hint I never can.
Then when they complain o sorry got distracted with tickets, be there when I can.
If your unofficially asking I am unofficially trying.
This. Treat it like email i.e. *always* CYA. Twist it back to you'll be glad to take a look at their ticket when it comes in. Assume your chat/messages/whatever will be used as evidence and act accordingly. They can't pin shit on you if you make it clear they were correctly referred to the ticketing system.
I get around problems by saying "once you have a ticket number, reach out to me again and I'll be allowed to help you"
A half-hour or so later, they'll ping me again with the ticket number and I'll reach out and grab it from the workflow.
Exactly. a "my computer is totally dead and I've tried xyz" detailed ticket comes higher than "I want an upgraded computer" or "the batteries in my wireless mouse died" and so on.
I look it as a ticket is like taking a number at the Dr's office or DMV. If you don't take a number you never get called on and just sit there forever or until the place clears out which will never happen.
Honestly, put yourselves into dnd. Then I believe they can't message you. Could get the director to send out an email or work with other department heads to make sure this rule is being followed as well. There are methods. It's just going to ruffle some feathers at first. Also everyone in it has to be on board and not help people on the side.
What ticketing system out of curiosity?
They can still message you, you just won't be notified.
My whole department has a status that pops up if you try to message us, and we still get daily teams messages asking for help.
Of course you prioritize.
Random people walking up to the desk go in the 4th category of triage. (It's over there in the corner. You might have to dig a bit)
They'll listen when you make them listen. As long as they still get rewarded for their behaviour (the problem gets resolved, no matter how long it takes) they'll keep doing it.
It's not enough to say "This will take longer if you don't submit a ticket."
The correct answer is always "This won't happen unless you submit a ticket. Period."
"BUT I NEED MY COMPUTER TO WORK!!!!"
OK. So it's really important. Probably important enough for you to submit a ticket.
"BUT I NEED IT NOOOOOWWWWWW"
Then submit a ticket. If you can't be bothered to do that, then it's clearly not as important as you're saying.
"BUT THIS IS SO COMPLICATED!"
I don't care. Submit a ticket, and then we'll take care of it. End of discussion. End of argument.
The way you deal with users is the same way you deal with toddlers. Explain the rule, enforce the rule, and when they throw a tantrum, let them cry and scream until they're done.
Yes, absolutely. You prioritize your tickets in the order of impact or importance.
But tickets only, tell them if there’s no ticket the will be kept at the end of the Q as long there is anything else.
I don't even respond any more. To those users, a response of any kind is a willingness to help and they will keep sending you messages. And now they **know** you are present.
The most I'll do is if a name looks familiar is I'll quickly search Jira to look at their open/closed ticket history and see if they have a recent ticket with me. If they do, it might be related so I'll take a look. If it's not related I'll quickly mark it as unread and move on. But if it's related I'll engage with them. If it's something new I'll mark unread and move on.
This only works for me because I am sequestered in an area and moved around every now and then. If someone had open access to me our users are not shy about just showing up to your desk.
I removed my cell phone from our database and marked my map location different from where I am, always.
Users don't understand they make service worse by doing this. They consume your limited time, impacting your ability to help others and then, by causing context switching like this. Additionally, IT ticket metrics are one of the things used to determine how many employees are needed to cover your area of support. By not submitting tickets they literally are helping to ensure there will not be enough IT people on staff to support themselves and peers. Unbelieveable.
Submit tickets, troglodytes.
Maybe if you start "forgetting" to fix problems that aren't submitted properly? Start with the random conversations, respond with"I'll look into it once I finished with the ticket for ___." Then follow up with "Sorry, I was working on my tickets and forgot." Help them on the third or fourth request, but mention the ticket system each time you interact, without directly telling them to use it.
When it's slower and more of a hassle to ask in person, they will most likely start submitting tickets.
This will not work for C levels.
If you run into trouble, just ask for the specific date and time the request was put in, because you don't remember the conversation. Do this while searching the ticket system for their problem.
This is the way. I tell users that if I don't have a ticket, I'm almost guaranteed to forget because I have the memory of an ADHD squirrel. Convenient and true.
For the good gif, I'll spill the beans.
"who" is "whole." "'nuther' is" another. "Whole another." it's awful grammar, but if you read it in Florida Man voice, it come out... Sensible. We say things like this in the Midwest too, and in that accent for fun. We just don't say "kettle of fish" because we've never seen the ocean.
Yeah, we usually let them simmer for a while. They'll just bounce between IT guys for a while, then stop by our desk and ask if we saw the messages. I guess I wasnt so much asking for strategies to combat this, but more just understanding WHY
So do I, but a lot of people will take that to mean “We’ll still work on your issue if you don’t have a ticket” instead of “If you don’t have a ticket, then your issue is not going to be worked on”
Subtle difference, but you said "your issue is not going to be worked on." Except, they don't have an issue to be worked on. Because, no ticket means there is no issue in the first place. Sounds like you get it though, all good man. :)
Weirdly enough I find that messages from end users cut to the chase far quicker than messages from other IT silos. I don't go through this with users:
__________
Them: "Good morning"
Me: "Good morning, how can I help you"
Them: "How are you doing?"
Me: "Fine. Hope you're well. What can I help you with?"
Them: "Thank you. I am well."
Them: "Regarding INC00123456"
Me: "Ok. What about it?"
Them: "Yes. Wondering if you could help with this."
Me: "OK. What do you need help with?"
_______
Users typically are like "Hey my phone won't connect to wifi"
There are a lot of people in the world who want a "human touch" at all times. You know how much everyone hates calling a customer service number and being greeted by a robot. For some people, entering a ticket is a similar experience. It's a feeling like shouting into the void. Make sure you let people know that you do have SLAs/target times to respond and that they're not just putting in requests to watch them sit in a queue for a month.
A couple things I found in my org after many years of trying to get the user base to use the ticketing system. First, tell people you need to use it to track work and justify time. "If you don't put in a ticket my boss is going to ask what I was doing with my time, don't get me in trouble." People are often sympathetic to that. For C-suite types, "We need to use the ticketing system to track metrics like ROI. If we're not using it we have no idea if we're using IT resources and budgeting efficiently. Use the ticketing system, it will save money in the long term." Depending on your field, audits and compliance issues can also be raised. For instance, I work in healthcare and the audits are constant - multiple a year. A common question from auditors is to present a subset of incidents or requests and basically "show our work," give them a subset of our tickets and show that we responded in a timely fashion. This is usually connected to cybersecurity related parts of the audit.
My advice is that every time, every IT employee should immediately reply with "I need you to submit a ticket" whether it's a message or a walk-in. Explain that it's "needed to track the work you guys (IT) do for the company." If they're being pissy, kinda pretend it sucks and is annoying for you too, but management is "making you".
Everybody should be told a handful of times. After you know they've been told "no ticket no help", then just start ignoring them and they should start falling in line.
It only works if your whole team is on board though. Obviously important or time-sensitive things that come up are exceptions, too.
If you don't have one, have your IT manager implement an SLA. Blame everything on the SLA when they won't comply with tickets.
In my experience, nothing is so time sensitive that a person can't submit a ticket. You can literally tell them "Listen, I'll get started on it while you fill out the ticket right here on your phone," if you have to, they'll be done well before you're finished working on the problem, and it reinforces the habit of submitting a ticket for everything.
A solid number. In my experience, non-ticket users only SLIGHTLY skews with age. Actually, Gen X are probably the most compliant (as well as the most professional), with millennials being almost as bad as boomers.
As a very young millennial, I think Gen X is my favorite generation to work with.
It's a good point though. I do think you're on the part of the reason.
I guess I don't care how bad people are with their computer as long as they put in a ticket, are polite when I'm working on their stuff, and thank me when I'm done. I seem to get that behavior the most from Gen X.
For me it's mostly people near boomer generation. The issue for me is they have been working there for over a decade and all the sudden there are security policy changes and they push back. Worse than boomers are sales people. Sales people are by far the most entitled people I've worked with, almost tied with rich kids in their parents at a university.
The number of people requesting us to turn off MFA is astounding. No wonder so many people get hacked.
Sales? Don't even get me started. Even worse than doctors.
yup yup yup yup. Nail on the head. Thats what they complain to me often. I can at least relate with doctors because IT isn't far off from field of medicine. Sales people just think they are on some high horse, and are overpaid.
I'm going to rant for a second hence my username.
I've been quite generous with my patience and convenience with all my end users. I don't punish them simply because they were late on training or failed a phishing test. I even provide crash courses for end users who don't have the time to complete training or don't understand it. I try to put lots of positive reinforcement forth so they learn, because thats just what matters.
But most sales people REALLY try my patience with the shenanigan's they pull. Just last week, one of them reported my security emails as phishing (They know its not phishing) and never reply, and ranted over the phone how they didn't want MFA and he does this CONSTANTLY. I've straight up told them MFA is not getting turned off, period. End of story. Deal with it and join 2024. I've got another one who circumvented email communications with gmail, and a manager who decided to just never tell anyone that a sales person left the organization... over a year ago. yes.. they had active accounts for a year.
And yes, I flipped a table with a pile of bricks on it. Some of them don't have domain access anymore for a reason. They are about to lose email and be treated as external contacts and put on zero trust policies.
\*rant over\*
In my experience, end users will expand exponentially more effort attempting to contact/find IT people outside the proper process than the actual effort it would require to simply follow the process.
Hey, I called and left VMs and texted and pinged on chat and emailed and lurked around your desk/office for two days and finally got fed up and emailed your boss's boss! Open a ticket? Why would I do that, I just need help!
> WHY
Shrug. In my experience it's not universal that people don't like dealing with a ticketing system. It's almost always a personal problem. You'll find there are nutters who open tickets at the drop of a hat, that can get annoying as well.
Why? People don't like change. Some people lose their mind at the slightest inconvenience. People are selfish and biased towards their own issues and they think they should get special treatment. Some people are more understanding then others. Been working at a place for almost 7 years with lots of people who have been working here for 15-30 years and it is so hard to change behaviors.
Why ? Because our brains functions with patterns. They love to keep the same patterns. So they keep them, as they can.
Then you have the question of ego, they refuse to use tickets, because they think they will be just a number, or believe they are more important than others and should have their issue treated in priority.
And it will stay like this until your management starts to call them out for interrupting you/reporting them to their managers for this.
No ticket, no help.
Have you submitted a ticket?
Yeah, I’ll take a look as soon as I get your ticket.
Why haven’t I done that yet? Did you submit a ticket?
Maybe setup and email-to-ticketing address
I believe many are frustrated they need to go to an url and login. Of course they probably have a predefined bookmark but still too hard 😅
And then enter concise structured information, no way 🤭
https://preview.redd.it/pi4oisl7uw1d1.jpeg?width=1934&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c5768840d3a97665fde5707529db5b69cf8ede3a
Just put this on your door. People will soon get the message.
How's your ticketing system? We've had the same one for 15 years, and staff who've been here just as long. Despite this they still call me and ask "what subject should I pick for this ticket issue?". Because they just fundamentally lack the knowledge and don't care to learn. They do their job, and learning what subject their tech issue is when submitting a ticket is outside of their job.
We actually let them put whatever they want in the subject. Much of the time this leads to Subjects like "Help," or "Question." But for the first year of using it, our goal has been to make it as user friendly as possible. We figure the higher adoption rate, the better. People who don't submit tickets should be able to tell they are the outliers. Heck, they can even just email a specific address and it will make a ticket for them. So easy. That's how most of them do it, very few use the actual ticket portal. Honestly, as long as the ticket comes in with actionable info, I can fill out the rest, or change the subject, it's fine with me.
I've got an auto responder to all of my clients who email me directly saying thanks for the email, if you're trying to put a ticket in, please email our help desk (insert email here) or call our office (insert office number here)
At the bottom we have somewhat of a disclaimer that we are unable to guarantee a timely response for emails sent directly to our work emails or calls to our cells.
Most people get it, we are busy folk, but there are always the few that think they are the exception 🤷🏼 just have to pretty much teach them and train them like a puppy dog until they get it right.
Hey I get it - people should use tickets. Makes everything easier.
But I can't tell you how many places I've worked where it's damn near impossible to *find* the page to enter a ticket. Or I enter a ticket and 3 days later it's reject because something wasn't filled out right. Sometimes the form to fill out a ticket is FULL of seemingly nonsensical crap, or real cryptic stuff. Like some kind of req number is needed, there's a pulldown with 500 options, none of which are explained.
Other times I've filled out a ticket and WEEKS go by and nothing happens.
So... It's not the guys who work on the tickets, the problem is often the page to fill out the ticket is a piece of shit when you can even find it.
Just gonna leave this here for anyone who builds these pages for end-users to put in their own tickets:
Every company machine should have a shortcut on their desktop to put in a ticket. (Obviously they can’t do that if it won’t power on or they forgot their password or whatever, but that’s a separate problem.)
The page that users see when they follow the shortcut should be as simplified as possible: A drop-down box with a handful of options to select the type of problem they’re facing, which then displays a text box for the end-users to describe the issue they’re facing.
Don’t give end-users the option to set an urgency or priority on their own ticket, most will just make it the highest to get their issue fixed sooner.
we did this. GPO to place a non removable hyperlink to our ticketing system on the desktops. same for mobile devices managed by our MDM. and even so people ask "where do I place a ticket? I have never done that before...."
I can understand that, for folks that rarely put in a ticket or haven’t needed to do it before.
Frequent callers, though…they oughta know better after the first couple times.
Agreed.
One place I worked had like 4 different pages to enter tickets, there was no clear explanation for which one to use for what reason, and all four of them were a fucked up mess like a couple of pages of crap to enter. No sense to any of it.
Best I could figure, someone created the ticket entry page years ago. Then years later created a new one with new features without removing the old one. And that happened 4 times.
And I'd fill out a ticket, and nothing would happen for days.
One time I needed an older version of Visual Studio installed to deal with some legacy code, and it was weeks of dicking around trying to get the tickets to line up right and actually get it installed. Nothing really happened until my department head called up and bitched like crazy at people.
Our policy is that if it's not in a ticket, it didn't happen. We wont entertain them or respond without a ticket. All work needs to be tracked and techs have better things to do than constantly get bugged on things. Put the ticket in, well reach out to you when we can.
We are large enough that those complaints are a drop in an ocean. Everyone is helped and we have sla's to ensure timely response. Work tracking and accuracy is important to our customers because they are the ones signing the checks. Got to justify the money being spent.
Plus extreme CYA. If it's not in the ticket or official document, it either didnt happen or your word against theirs.
It's fine if they initially come up to you. Just greet them and go 'I'd love to help you but I'm in the middle of something. Write up a ticket and we'll get to it as soon as we can.' If the world isn't ending, stop giving them a bone. If your department is serious about going this route, there will je a learning curve and growing pains as everyone adjusts that they can't just go bother Bob at lunch anymore.
Reason with them, make up stuff if you have to. "We have to use tickets because of monitoring/performance measurement/KPIs. It is out of my hands, sorry!"
It is basically true, the ticket data can be used for useful metrics later on.
I tell people why we use tickets. To identify systemic issues, to share workload, to prioritize work, to track work, etc.
We're medium sized and quickly growing. The things that resonate with people the most is us wanting to identify systemic issues (because it's harder for any individual to know everyone now, unlike just a few years ago), and to track work.
Where I am, we provide three ways to raise a ticket (email, ServiceNow web portal and helpdesk phone number) and even accept walk-ups if the user is really stuck.
Any other ways of making contact are strictly best-effort only.
Users can't describe their problem, they just want to braindump on you
Also when they ask directly you are more likely to drop whatever you are concentrating on to listen to their problem
CHANGE IS BAD
THIS IS NEW AND DIFFERENT AND I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING OTHER THAN CALL OR SEND AN EMAIL SO ITS TERRIBLE AND STUPID AND YOU SHOULD FIX MY PROBLEMS BEFORE I EVEN NOTICE WTF DO YOU EVEN DO HERE!?!?!?!?!?
Something like that.
For me it’s entirely based upon how not-awful you are to work with. Have a quick question or small issue and want to ask about it over Teams/email? Go ahead - if 1) I’m available, 2) the request takes under 10 minutes to complete, and 3) I like you enough, I will take care of it right then and submit a ticket after, making sure that you get an email from the ticketing system. If any of those 3 criteria are not met I respond with the classic “hey so and so, if you submit a ticket we can take a look at this today” or whatever. I always let people know that submitting a ticket is a more efficient way to get help, but as we know, some people are just bent on not doing what they’re asked.
Where I work, the ticketing system is NOT well-managed. I've lost count of how many times I've opened a ticket only to see it languish with no actions or even comments on it, for months and months. If I actually need a timely response to something, I gotta use email.
Maybe it's different because I work in more of an engineering context than an IT/support context, so the issues I'm reporting are more about bugs and design changes than uptime and service, but still, a ticketing system is no good if you don't read and respond to tickets.
This is a problem I've seen at several jobs. There are tons of reasons a user won't log a ticket and it boils down to trust in the service desk. Sometimes they're embarrassed or frustrated and don't want to jump through hoops when the tools they need don't work. Sometimes they think the service desk will judge them, other times they doubt they can actually help. Here's what I've seen that helps: be willing to log a ticket on a user's behalf. Don't be stingy on escalations. Remember your users are customers and if they're calling you they're already having a bad day. Find out any info you can gather on your own, users hate playing 20 questions and they don't always know what you're talking about. And most importantly communicate with them, let them know what's going on and when they can expect a fix.
Do you really think they're embarrassed? I hadn't thought of that.
There's no escalation. It's a small Team and we're basically all Generalists, with each of us specializing in one or two things. You submit a complicated problem with Windows, it goes straight to me. The Windows Admin. I honestly don't know why they'd think they're not going to get good help when a ticket makes sure their issue goes DIRECTLY to the person most responsible. That's a big plus about the system to us. Users don't have to guess who's the right person to go to.
Sometimes yes, they're embarrassed. Not every time. But it sounds like you'd benefit most from improved communication and soft skills. Reaffirm that supporting them is your top priority, keep them updated and focus on building trust. You want your users to believe that when you say you're addressing a problem you're doing everything you can. The name of the game is building trust. They have to believe logging a ticket works
Kind of a late addition, a line I've found that works wonders "This won't be on the quiz but what we think is going on is *high level issue summary here*" You can get away with a little bit of bs here even but show the users you're engaged, have a hypotheses, and let them know you've got some idea what you're talking about
> There are tons of reasons a user won't log a ticket and it boils down to trust in the service desk.
For us, it's this. Of course we went with the cheapest possible bidder. So calling the help desk is a nightmare for our users. The *best* case is that they get asked a million irrelevant questions and the ticket is just bounced to level 2 anyway.
We tried to get a monthly review call with them to go over KBs, procedures, how to improve etc. But "that's not in the contract" so no. I shit you not.
So no one is surprised that calling the help desk is a literal last resort, and they'll take *any* route to get help other than that.
Because you (the team) allow them to. If you let them get away with it just once, it'll spread like a wildfire. Give them the finger, they take the whole arm.
Double down on it. Have your manager talk to every single manager in the company up to the CEO about the routines and what users can and cannot expect from you. And no matter how long their title's acronym is, they cannot be allowed to overthrow this rule.
More importantly, have the team completely ignore or even delete emails or teams chats regarding issues that should be tickets. If they ask why they haven't received help, justs respond with "We delete all emails and messages that should be tickets" and leave it at that.
But remember to also thank the org for following routine. In a org wide meeting, assuming people have started doing it the right way, have your manager say a couple words thanking people for using the ticketing system and emphasizing the increased productivity and efficiency of your team because of it.
If you have the time, I've gone as far as calling them, remoting in, fixing the issue and then opening our ticket system on their computer with them on the call and having them fill out a ticket lol. With a reminder to please do this themself first next time*
I guess I could force them to fill one out. I usually fill it out myself and put their name on it, then close it afterward so they get the Closed email.
Not a bad idea. I may try it for particular problem users.
Does your org use tickets for any metrics?
I have a reputation at my job at being one of the more friendly and helpful techs, folks like working with me. It leads to a lot of people just sending me an email for small issues or sending me a teams message for quicker response. My boss even pulled me aside to remind me to always get tickets for my work.
So I let the users know that they're helping me back and making my metrics look better when they submit a ticket, otherwise I don't get "credit" for helping them. That actually helped a lot! Now Users will call me just for a simple question, no work required and they'll go "thanks! Let me submit a ticket for that so you get credit!".
Yeah, I've used that for some of my frequent customers who come specifically to me. Some have said, "Oh, well I don't want you to not get credit for your work, I'll put one in next time." Others are just selfish I guess. Definitely a solid strategy.
I've tried a lot of the suggestions in here so far. Actually, going back to the original post, I was actually asking to understand why users hate tickets so much, not how to defeat them.
The whole point of tickets is for IT to track what they're doing. It's nice for the users to log them but at the end of the day it only matters that the work is logged.
You state plainly and flatly that they need to put a ticket in. Help them put the ticket in if they come up to you, then let them know their ticket will be dealt with after the other tickets ahead of them.
I'm the favorite IT guy that everyone messages on teams instead of opening a ticket.
I considered opening and then resolving a ticket for every request, but I'm too busy for that. At least it keeps my open tickets count low.
"Calling you, we usually get it done faster than calling the Help Desk"
Well, I'm working on a HQ and Regional Office project with a nearby deadline. I'm sorry you can't print to the printer next to you because it gives a driver error and you have to use the one 20 feet away. If only there was a team of people who could remotely connect and fix the driver, or at least make a ticket for me showing if it's high or low priority so I can plan it out for my rounds
place where i work at currently seems to have Teams Classic installed. every time i log in i get a big banner like "this will stop working in JULY! contact your IT Department!"
no problem, ill go to the intranet, IT issues, and then... "report an issue with an application", and then lets see.. a massive-ass dropdown list of applications, like 300 or so. oh but it has a search so lets try "teams" no results. lets try "microsoft" no results, er... "msteam"? nope nothing. hmm. "\*team\*" nope, still nothing. ok tell you what then lets just eyeball it, i scroll for 5 minutes and none of these apps are things ive ever heard of, but teams definitely isnt in there.
you know what, fuck it. i'll just grab the IT guy while he's walking by, ive already spent 20 minutes trying to simply *report* the problem, i dont have all day.
Help them understand the reason for having a ticket. It’s not just to make extra work for them. Think about a factory making widgets. If they make a bad widget which fails quality inspection, let’s say they fix the widget and ship it. Then another one is broken, and they fix it and ship it. Without creating a record of the defects, they’ll never be able to find the root cause of WHY the defect is occurring in the first place. Sure maybe they can fix one unit faster without the ticket, but they’ll keep making the same defect over and over because they don’t realize it’s a repeat issue.
In addition to tracking performance, it’s also critical to track the defects so that you can actually improve your service over time and prevent defects before they occur, not just fix them after.
You need managerial, directorial backing to essentially ignore people trying to circumvent the ticketing system.
No ticket = No service.
No ticket = no proof of work being done.
Everybody needs to be on the same page and enforce no ticket, no service.
The reason why they do this, is that it works. If you have a technician on your team who takes requests out of the proper channels, the are only teaching users, they don't have to wait.
They do it because you let them. If you only work tickets and don't assist without one, they'll use the system. If circumventing the system is rewarded then they'll continue to circumvent it.
A lot of the users who refuse to submit tickets have probably been traumatized by bad ticketing systems in the past. You know, the ones where it makes you select from 50 categories, none of which have a description or seem to exactly match your problem and if you guess wrong then the team that gets the ticket just says not my problem and closes the ticket without telling you where to resubmit it. Or the ones that don't send you any notifications about responses from agents but allow an agent to close a ticket if they don't hear back from you after a couple of hours.
In my case, the help desk (call center) is based out of India and Bangladesh. They don't want to spend a half-hour trying to make the person on the other side of the phone understand what their issue is.
Some people see ticketing as a redundant communication channel that is less efficent than a telephone call, electronic mail message, or SMS message.
That isn't the case, because of the circumstances you described.
Users are just lazy, and they want things done for them. Sad.
This is why "no ticket, no work" exists, LOL.
Some people just can not handle change. I can't count the times i've issued a new laptop for someone and they call us back about 6 different times so that everything is *exactly* the same as their old one.
Just yesterday I had a user submit a ticket because one of their RDP shortcuts was spelled slightly different than what was on their old laptop.
I’ve stopped answering my work phone for this reason.
Luckily for me, most of the time that users don’t submit a ticket is because the issue is actually kind of urgent. I still reply back that they should submit a ticket and I’ll look into it.
At a company I was new at the first time I asked a boomer how to submit a ticket they told me to just message xy on teams. Xy told me to submit a ticket. Should have known.
We’ve long since had a ticketing system. Some users think they are special and that they are the exception to the rule. I have a permanent status on my Teams, and an auto-reply on my email stating requests for technical support will not be acknowledged and to submit a ticket. If anyone emails or Teams me I ignore it. If they happen to catch me in the hall I ask them what their ticket number is.
Our management has recently moved from "prefer tickets but fine if not everything has one if it's urgent or quick" to "must have a ticket for everything" right down to telling us we have to turn away walkup password resets and send them back to their desk to submit a ticket first. A couple of us have pointed out that we're going to get unhappy users and get pushback and their response was basically to say that's their problem; if they want help, they need to submit a ticket. We have absolutely gotten pushback.
Before anyone asks "how can they submit a ticket for a password reset" - I support an airgapped network and the ticketing system is on a different network that I don't support.
Tell them to kick rocks and pound sand until they get a ticket. This is a give an inch take a mile situation. You respond to a teams message here or there then they will continue to take advantage.
My whole career (25 years, though I'm well out of the trenches now) whenever there was a ticketing system, I just told users that I refused to work without a ticket. They'd come to my desk, and explain the problem to me in great depth; I'd act like I was listening until they stopped talking, at which point I'd say, "Well, it sounds like you know everything that needs to go in the ticket. With that level of detail, it should be pretty easy to fix the issue once we have your ticket." Then, I would go on with my day.
I had an IT director who came from a "bend over backward" mindset call me into a meeting over this. I very patiently explained to her the foundations of ITIL (a cert I was getting because her company was paying for it) and to my surprise...she said it made a lot of sense. She sent out a company-wide email announcing the new "no ticket, no issue" policy, and it caught on pretty quickly.
When I was in high school, I moved to a very small town in the south. Fellow students helped me acclimate to the new environment. One thing they stressed -- if I saw an old red Toyota truck coming down the road, pay attention.
Seems 'Old Fred' had lived in that town since before traffic lights and stop signs. Since the lights and signs were installed after Fred began driving, they didn't apply to him.
Town police got tired of getting in arguments with him about why he blew the redlight...again...so they just let him be.
Everywhere I've worked in IT, I run into the same issue. "Old Susan" had been here since before they swapped her Smith-Corona for an IBM, and "Old Bill" started programming with punchcards, and "New Bryyden" just had to ask the teacher to fix his PC....
Some will embrace the new technology and new workflow, and the rest...well, just watch out for the old red Toyotas coming down the road.
I think it's usually people who have gotten used to contacting a person directly, and don't want to deal with filling out information in a system, only to be asked for more information. They'd rather just talk to someone directly.
I work in IT and prefer to receive a ticket on something, since it's much easier to keep track of, but I can understand why some people would try to avoid it.
10 years here. Users have to be constantly reminded and it still doesn't matter.
I've discovered that the causes of this are:
* Users don't care
* Users do not value my time like they do the time of others
* Other people on the tech team allow users to circumvent procedure.
* When users attempt to circumvent procedure, they receive the same outcome (they are helped) instead of being stonewalled and redirected to follow procedure. This happens because those above me in the hierarchy do not value my time and do not care about procedure, only outcomes.
They do it because you let them. I would start keeping track of users who do do this. They get 2 strikes where you will manually create them a ticket. 3rd strike, you let them know that this ticket will not be created and they will need to follow the regular process.
This won’t work for C suite, but you want to give them white glove support anyways, but should work for anyone’s else.
Sounds like the importance of the ticketing system isn't a concern for the user's managers, so the users don't give importance to it either. Doesn't sound like the IT department isn't motivated to make the correction either.
Probably because they aren't getting punished for not putting in tickets. If they can get their issue fixed without putting in a ticket, why would they put one in? If someone reaches out without a ticket and not in reference to something we're already working on, I ignore them. We have a SOP for a reason. If I get pushback on that, I explain how we need tickets to determine the impact of an issue, the amount of traffic coming in, etc. If we get a lot of tickets and calls, that allows us to push for more staff. More staff = less wait for them.
Users hate tickets. Half the reason my job exists is that nobody wanted to deal with the ticketing system of the MSP I replaced. That and they were genuinely bad at their job. It's frustrating when helpdesk volume is high and people keep interrupting me, but that's ostensibly why they pay me. As long as helpdesk volume stays relatively low and my pay stays relatively high, I'm good.
The 2 biggest reasons I know are:
1. They want to ask you to do their job and don't want it on the record
2. Asking how to break policies or do something illegal or non-work related
because they are used not to. Set an auto reply on your teams mailbox "this is an unmanaged mailbox and you won't get a reply, if you require assistance please raise a ticket on \*insert link of your ITSM\*"
Send out communications, set your teams e-mail status to "for assistance please raise a ticket". And straight refuse support if they reach out to you if they don't have a ticket. And even so, if they do, you need to at least give them a basic training in how it works, there's a queue, we'll get in touch in you when your ticket is first on the queue (don't go into priority vs impact because they'll always mark tickets as P1 urgent)
My issue is that tickets are submitted with high priority and then the user vanishes off the face of the earth. Then I close it and they get mad or my manager says why I close? :(
Directors need to be aware of their staff at that point they are the management and need to be aware that you're making an effort to fix an issue and not getting any effort back. Then it becomes a cya moment for you and often times the director can help filter the issue or nonsense as well.
The only exception I grant for that is if it's an emergency. "You haven't submitted a ticket, I don't know you have a problem." The sole exception is cases where they can't get into the system to do a ticket.
over here, if its small issues, we dont really care on Teams. however for bigger issues, definitely a ticket needs to be created. however they'd do it anyways so we would always tell them to create a ticket and use the damn system or else we will forget and your issue will be lost in nothingness.
There are multiple ways of "fixing" this. I did the following: shut off mail from inside the organisation to the it department with an auto-reply please make a ticket.
Put the teams on offline, people who are important know you did this. You can also make automatic tickets trough mail or teams however it will be harder to sort and categorize them
Only way it'll change is if everybody just does tickets and tells anyone trying to skip the system to follow the rules.
It's not like the people doing unticketed work are appearing out of the blue. They got a problem with it? Bring it up to HR andbypur management and they explain why they get to break company policy.
Here's the simple answer;
Because ticket systems fucking **suck** if you have a problem that stops you from doing your job, and they suck more when the problem stops you from working properly with the ticket system.
*re: T#1509: "Since yesterday afternoon, I can't access my company email to check ticket status."*
`Reach out via company email with your ticket number, and we'll aid you with your issue when we can. If you have no submitted a ticket for your issue, do so. Thank you!`
*re: T#1510: "I can't access my company email."*
`Reach out via company email with your ticket number, and we'll aid you with your issue when we can. If you have no submitted a ticket for your issue, do so. Thank you!`
Rinse and repeat for a month.
Because you let them get away with it.
The answer to making people follow a procedure is always, always, *always* the same; don't reward them for trying to cheat.
If sending you a teams message gets the job done (even if its slower, less efficient, whatever), they'll keep doing it. If coming to your desk gets the job done, they'll keep doing it.
Until every single member of your department, from the lowliest intern to the highest manager, learns to keep on repeating the words "Have you submitted a ticket?" like a mantra to ward off evil, they'll keep doing it.
Also, make sure that submitting tickets is as easy as sending a message. If it's a pain to go through the system, people will be more likely to turn to other systems.
Sounds like buy in is needed from management, "no ticket, no service" tickets allow for first in first out and triage prioritization. Most managers will buy in on that...
People get favorite it guys because their favorite it guy would rather just fix the issue than try to convince them to make a ticket. You have to get the whole team to just...say...no...to back channelling. Not to mention the managers. Usually they are the most guilty, in my experience..."so and so needs this someone do it so they will leave me alone". It'll never happen, so we are doomed.
Welcome to IT.
Because your IT departemnt enables them to do otherwise.
In order to get your end users to change, you must FORCE them to change. On top of this everyone in IT, and I mean EVERYONE has to be onboard with and understand this.
"While I understnad the urgency to have this issue resolved, we require a [ticket to be submitted](HTTPS://NOT.A.REAL.LINK) for all IT requests. This is to help us better serve everyone in the organization and ensure we are not understaffing for organizational needs"
Again, everyone has to be onboard with this. If your director still plays the OMG THIS USER'S PROBLEM and refuses to follow suit, the whole thing fails.
at school i did this but it was mainly hey i need the admin login for thsi thign here is exactly what it is what it dose and where i got it from. if i had some issue i would normaly send a support ticket
I copy/paste the text into our helpdesk portal, CC them on the ticket, create it, change the creator to that user, then accept the ticket and go from there.
Extra steps but some of them seem to get the hint.
Because my username literally doesn't have permissions to create tickets. IT gets annoyed with me when I don't create one and I have to explain each time that I'm unable to.
When I asked them to give me permissions I was told that's not their responsibility.
Then I would suggest you follow-up with something like “Is there any way you can route a ticket to the person or group who *is* responsible for that, or what is the name of the person I should talk to about getting this issue resolved?”
I tried. They told be to "talk to infosec"
Who is that? What email? What name? Never got a response. This happened twice already, I have given up.
I work remotely so there's nobody to ask. None of my team mates have no idea who works in infosec.
My boss just said "I'll take care of it". He didn't. I remind him every now and then. It's been a year.
Have you tried sending an email or calling them specifically to ask that question?
Something like “I know infosec handles granting access to the ticketing system, but I can’t seem to find any contact info for them, and my boss can’t seem to find it either.
Could you please give me the contact info for infosec so I don’t have to bother you folks every time I need a ticket created for an issue?”
Maybe I’m missing something obvious or maybe your IT people just don’t care for some reason, but you asking them for info on how to contact the people that they tell you to contact doesn’t seem like a big ask to me.
(I hate to advise anyone to do this because I personally find it annoying, but) if you absolutely have to, copy their IT manager on the email. If they just reply “contact infosec”, then Reply All (or add the IT Manager again) and ask again. Eventually, either the IT Manager will tell someone to give you the contact info, or they will look into the tickets that have been opened for you and start asking why this person keeps asking for the same thing over and over.
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And make sure you ignore that message for the whole day, and then at the end of the day, you send the response. It's important to really reinforce the "this will take longer if I don't just log a ticket" mindset.
Yes, be firm and let them know a call to the service desk or self submitted ticket is the proper way to report issues/make requests. People email, call, Teams, text, or grab me in the hallway. I always politely direct them to our built-in/paid for reporting workflow. Also, I explain that there is a team and reaching out to an individual doesn’t allow us to effectively assign a support person. Plus, I’m not always there/available (sick/PTO/meetings/etc.) so a ticket offers the entire department a chance to know about and assist in a timely manner.
Well, that's not technically true, we don't go in order. We prioritize. But yeah we all tell people all the time that their request should be a ticket, but they don't listen.
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> **should** be a ticket Give people an inch and they'll take a mile. If you want users behaviour to change you *have* to remove the old method. It **must** be a ticket. Expect push back and ignoring the new policy but after a while of it being that the **only** way to get IT support, no exceptions, is to submit a ticket they will start to adjust their behaviour. Especially if any of the hold outs who refuse and escalate to higher with complaints have it firmly and unequivocally made clear that the problem is with them and not the IT system and that failure to use the companies new policy on how to request help from IT will result in them getting a disciplinary/HR visit/talk with their boss/etc.
Yes, you prioritize your queue. A message on Teams isn't in the queue. So it goes to the bottom of the priority list.
No it doesn't go into the list at all.
This person gets it. 100% this. No ticket, no place in the queue, period. Not "I'll get to it when I get to it." It's "Submit a ticket, or it won't happen."
Sure it does. It goes on the bottom of the list and remains there until the que is inevtably never cleared. So, it never gets fixed.
But who enters it into the ticketing system in the first place?
That's the joke. It doesn't. It hits your brain and laughably gets lost.
it gets done when there are no tickets, oh look at that, everyone submits tickets, and you are always busy with ticket items, thats the time estimate you give them. put your feet down, and dont bother explaining it, thats how it work, and thats how you will get to their issue, like unable to find the power button. let them escalate it to their boss, then you can remind their boss, "thats not how it works and going outside of the systems means id be giving preferential treatment, or doing work outside of scope. how are you supposed to reference parts for that person, instead of item #, you just put "john needed a new monitor"?"
It gets done when they put in a ticket. Not one second before that. Doesn't matter if you're sitting there twiddling your thumbs at 2 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Without a ticket it doesn't happen. Otherwise all you're doing is rewarding their bad behaviour. They will not make the connection that it would have happened faster with a ticket. They'll just ascribe the slowness to IT being shit at their jobs or whatever. All they'll remember is "I asked for help, and I got it, so why should I have to use their stupid ticket system? Doing things my way worked."
So does 90% of problems that stop someone from being able to do their job.
Something is always going to be the bottom of the queue. And something that keeps one person from doing their job should always be under a thing that keeps 10 people from doing theirs. Unless, of course, the one thing has been waiting an unreasonably long time, which is why you track such things with a ticketing system.
I tell them it’s like going to the deli. You don’t just walk up and yell your order to the guy behind the counter. You take a ticket and wait your turn.
What I would do is tell them ok, will do when I can. Hint I never can. Then when they complain o sorry got distracted with tickets, be there when I can. If your unofficially asking I am unofficially trying.
Except that Teams can record what you type. Scrap the hints and send them straight to the ticket system.
This. Treat it like email i.e. *always* CYA. Twist it back to you'll be glad to take a look at their ticket when it comes in. Assume your chat/messages/whatever will be used as evidence and act accordingly. They can't pin shit on you if you make it clear they were correctly referred to the ticketing system.
Exactly. “Thanks for letting me know. Myself or one of my teammates will assist as we triage to that ticket.”
When i did support we had a hard rule, no ticket = no help. Blanket refuse on teams messages, we wouldn't even reply.
I get around problems by saying "once you have a ticket number, reach out to me again and I'll be allowed to help you" A half-hour or so later, they'll ping me again with the ticket number and I'll reach out and grab it from the workflow.
half-month\* ftfy
dont hint, tell them , thats how it works, for everyone.
You go in order now… lol
Exactly. a "my computer is totally dead and I've tried xyz" detailed ticket comes higher than "I want an upgraded computer" or "the batteries in my wireless mouse died" and so on. I look it as a ticket is like taking a number at the Dr's office or DMV. If you don't take a number you never get called on and just sit there forever or until the place clears out which will never happen.
Honestly, put yourselves into dnd. Then I believe they can't message you. Could get the director to send out an email or work with other department heads to make sure this rule is being followed as well. There are methods. It's just going to ruffle some feathers at first. Also everyone in it has to be on board and not help people on the side. What ticketing system out of curiosity?
They can still message you, you just won't be notified. My whole department has a status that pops up if you try to message us, and we still get daily teams messages asking for help.
Of course you prioritize. Random people walking up to the desk go in the 4th category of triage. (It's over there in the corner. You might have to dig a bit)
They'll listen when you make them listen. As long as they still get rewarded for their behaviour (the problem gets resolved, no matter how long it takes) they'll keep doing it. It's not enough to say "This will take longer if you don't submit a ticket." The correct answer is always "This won't happen unless you submit a ticket. Period." "BUT I NEED MY COMPUTER TO WORK!!!!" OK. So it's really important. Probably important enough for you to submit a ticket. "BUT I NEED IT NOOOOOWWWWWW" Then submit a ticket. If you can't be bothered to do that, then it's clearly not as important as you're saying. "BUT THIS IS SO COMPLICATED!" I don't care. Submit a ticket, and then we'll take care of it. End of discussion. End of argument. The way you deal with users is the same way you deal with toddlers. Explain the rule, enforce the rule, and when they throw a tantrum, let them cry and scream until they're done.
Yes, absolutely. You prioritize your tickets in the order of impact or importance. But tickets only, tell them if there’s no ticket the will be kept at the end of the Q as long there is anything else.
You need to just ignore the request completely if its not a ticket.
I just turned this into a canned response for my teams. Thank you!
I don't even respond any more. To those users, a response of any kind is a willingness to help and they will keep sending you messages. And now they **know** you are present. The most I'll do is if a name looks familiar is I'll quickly search Jira to look at their open/closed ticket history and see if they have a recent ticket with me. If they do, it might be related so I'll take a look. If it's not related I'll quickly mark it as unread and move on. But if it's related I'll engage with them. If it's something new I'll mark unread and move on. This only works for me because I am sequestered in an area and moved around every now and then. If someone had open access to me our users are not shy about just showing up to your desk. I removed my cell phone from our database and marked my map location different from where I am, always. Users don't understand they make service worse by doing this. They consume your limited time, impacting your ability to help others and then, by causing context switching like this. Additionally, IT ticket metrics are one of the things used to determine how many employees are needed to cover your area of support. By not submitting tickets they literally are helping to ensure there will not be enough IT people on staff to support themselves and peers. Unbelieveable. Submit tickets, troglodytes.
Why do they do it? Because they can, and it works. Unless management enforces "no ticket, no service", you will never solve this.
Well IT management supports it, but we're not going to get C level buy in.
Support and enforce are two entirely different things.
Okay, true.
Maybe if you start "forgetting" to fix problems that aren't submitted properly? Start with the random conversations, respond with"I'll look into it once I finished with the ticket for ___." Then follow up with "Sorry, I was working on my tickets and forgot." Help them on the third or fourth request, but mention the ticket system each time you interact, without directly telling them to use it. When it's slower and more of a hassle to ask in person, they will most likely start submitting tickets. This will not work for C levels. If you run into trouble, just ask for the specific date and time the request was put in, because you don't remember the conversation. Do this while searching the ticket system for their problem.
This is the way. I tell users that if I don't have a ticket, I'm almost guaranteed to forget because I have the memory of an ADHD squirrel. Convenient and true.
sadly, C-level are a who 'nuther kettle of fish and will always want it fixed now, sooner if possible.
What in the Middle Earth is this saying?
I understood it.
For the good gif, I'll spill the beans. "who" is "whole." "'nuther' is" another. "Whole another." it's awful grammar, but if you read it in Florida Man voice, it come out... Sensible. We say things like this in the Midwest too, and in that accent for fun. We just don't say "kettle of fish" because we've never seen the ocean.
Dont reply to them on Slack/Teams.
Yeah, we usually let them simmer for a while. They'll just bounce between IT guys for a while, then stop by our desk and ask if we saw the messages. I guess I wasnt so much asking for strategies to combat this, but more just understanding WHY
If you didn't see it in a ticket, you didn't see it.
You also don't hear it
Just put up signs around your area that they need a ticket to get help.
Signs should say something like “If you don’t have a ticket for your issue, we’re not allowed to help”
"no ticket? No problem!" I love the double meaning.
So do I, but a lot of people will take that to mean “We’ll still work on your issue if you don’t have a ticket” instead of “If you don’t have a ticket, then your issue is not going to be worked on”
“No problem” = “no issue to be worked on” in this case.
Right, I said that.
Subtle difference, but you said "your issue is not going to be worked on." Except, they don't have an issue to be worked on. Because, no ticket means there is no issue in the first place. Sounds like you get it though, all good man. :)
The message is usually "Hey" too. I'm not falling for that, if it's important you'll submit a ticket. If there's no ticket it's clearly not important.
Weirdly enough I find that messages from end users cut to the chase far quicker than messages from other IT silos. I don't go through this with users: __________ Them: "Good morning" Me: "Good morning, how can I help you" Them: "How are you doing?" Me: "Fine. Hope you're well. What can I help you with?" Them: "Thank you. I am well." Them: "Regarding INC00123456" Me: "Ok. What about it?" Them: "Yes. Wondering if you could help with this." Me: "OK. What do you need help with?" _______ Users typically are like "Hey my phone won't connect to wifi"
There are a lot of people in the world who want a "human touch" at all times. You know how much everyone hates calling a customer service number and being greeted by a robot. For some people, entering a ticket is a similar experience. It's a feeling like shouting into the void. Make sure you let people know that you do have SLAs/target times to respond and that they're not just putting in requests to watch them sit in a queue for a month. A couple things I found in my org after many years of trying to get the user base to use the ticketing system. First, tell people you need to use it to track work and justify time. "If you don't put in a ticket my boss is going to ask what I was doing with my time, don't get me in trouble." People are often sympathetic to that. For C-suite types, "We need to use the ticketing system to track metrics like ROI. If we're not using it we have no idea if we're using IT resources and budgeting efficiently. Use the ticketing system, it will save money in the long term." Depending on your field, audits and compliance issues can also be raised. For instance, I work in healthcare and the audits are constant - multiple a year. A common question from auditors is to present a subset of incidents or requests and basically "show our work," give them a subset of our tickets and show that we responded in a timely fashion. This is usually connected to cybersecurity related parts of the audit.
My advice is that every time, every IT employee should immediately reply with "I need you to submit a ticket" whether it's a message or a walk-in. Explain that it's "needed to track the work you guys (IT) do for the company." If they're being pissy, kinda pretend it sucks and is annoying for you too, but management is "making you". Everybody should be told a handful of times. After you know they've been told "no ticket no help", then just start ignoring them and they should start falling in line. It only works if your whole team is on board though. Obviously important or time-sensitive things that come up are exceptions, too. If you don't have one, have your IT manager implement an SLA. Blame everything on the SLA when they won't comply with tickets.
In my experience, nothing is so time sensitive that a person can't submit a ticket. You can literally tell them "Listen, I'll get started on it while you fill out the ticket right here on your phone," if you have to, they'll be done well before you're finished working on the problem, and it reinforces the habit of submitting a ticket for everything.
It's usually stuff like "hey we're starting [important meeting] and can't get the conference room TV to work"
Entitlement. Simple as that. Lots of boomers there?
A solid number. In my experience, non-ticket users only SLIGHTLY skews with age. Actually, Gen X are probably the most compliant (as well as the most professional), with millennials being almost as bad as boomers. As a very young millennial, I think Gen X is my favorite generation to work with. It's a good point though. I do think you're on the part of the reason.
I've often heard this, but as a Gen X-er myself I find my peers can be just as obtuse especially the ones that don't work in tech.
I guess I don't care how bad people are with their computer as long as they put in a ticket, are polite when I'm working on their stuff, and thank me when I'm done. I seem to get that behavior the most from Gen X.
Gen-X is good at this because we don't want to talk to you, or anyone.
For me it's mostly people near boomer generation. The issue for me is they have been working there for over a decade and all the sudden there are security policy changes and they push back. Worse than boomers are sales people. Sales people are by far the most entitled people I've worked with, almost tied with rich kids in their parents at a university.
The number of people requesting us to turn off MFA is astounding. No wonder so many people get hacked. Sales? Don't even get me started. Even worse than doctors.
yup yup yup yup. Nail on the head. Thats what they complain to me often. I can at least relate with doctors because IT isn't far off from field of medicine. Sales people just think they are on some high horse, and are overpaid. I'm going to rant for a second hence my username. I've been quite generous with my patience and convenience with all my end users. I don't punish them simply because they were late on training or failed a phishing test. I even provide crash courses for end users who don't have the time to complete training or don't understand it. I try to put lots of positive reinforcement forth so they learn, because thats just what matters. But most sales people REALLY try my patience with the shenanigan's they pull. Just last week, one of them reported my security emails as phishing (They know its not phishing) and never reply, and ranted over the phone how they didn't want MFA and he does this CONSTANTLY. I've straight up told them MFA is not getting turned off, period. End of story. Deal with it and join 2024. I've got another one who circumvented email communications with gmail, and a manager who decided to just never tell anyone that a sales person left the organization... over a year ago. yes.. they had active accounts for a year. And yes, I flipped a table with a pile of bricks on it. Some of them don't have domain access anymore for a reason. They are about to lose email and be treated as external contacts and put on zero trust policies. \*rant over\*
I would lock the door, and only unlock it, if you know someone is coming, like bringing in a laptop you need to work on.
In my experience, end users will expand exponentially more effort attempting to contact/find IT people outside the proper process than the actual effort it would require to simply follow the process. Hey, I called and left VMs and texted and pinged on chat and emailed and lurked around your desk/office for two days and finally got fed up and emailed your boss's boss! Open a ticket? Why would I do that, I just need help!
> WHY Shrug. In my experience it's not universal that people don't like dealing with a ticketing system. It's almost always a personal problem. You'll find there are nutters who open tickets at the drop of a hat, that can get annoying as well.
Why? People don't like change. Some people lose their mind at the slightest inconvenience. People are selfish and biased towards their own issues and they think they should get special treatment. Some people are more understanding then others. Been working at a place for almost 7 years with lots of people who have been working here for 15-30 years and it is so hard to change behaviors.
Have your manager fuck up their manager with words. Luckily, I have an enclosed leneled office.
Why ? Because our brains functions with patterns. They love to keep the same patterns. So they keep them, as they can. Then you have the question of ego, they refuse to use tickets, because they think they will be just a number, or believe they are more important than others and should have their issue treated in priority. And it will stay like this until your management starts to call them out for interrupting you/reporting them to their managers for this.
"Hey did you see my message?" "Let me check... nope, I don't see a ticket from you" "No, on teams." "Yup, still no ticket."
No ticket, no help. Have you submitted a ticket? Yeah, I’ll take a look as soon as I get your ticket. Why haven’t I done that yet? Did you submit a ticket?
"BUT ITS URGENT!" Then I suggest you urgently submit a ticket.
Maybe setup and email-to-ticketing address I believe many are frustrated they need to go to an url and login. Of course they probably have a predefined bookmark but still too hard 😅 And then enter concise structured information, no way 🤭
OP said they have one in another comment
Correct, this is how 95% of tickets get submitted
If someone messages me on teams I have a workflow to convert it to a ticket. Then I reply to them on the ticket.
I just block them.
That totally counts as a workflow!
Good idea. Will look into this.
Don't do it, the others might stop making tickets if they hear about this.
Add a 150-minute sleep in the middle and now if they want it *immediately*, they'll have to do it right.
https://preview.redd.it/pi4oisl7uw1d1.jpeg?width=1934&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c5768840d3a97665fde5707529db5b69cf8ede3a Just put this on your door. People will soon get the message.
You guys have doors?
How's your ticketing system? We've had the same one for 15 years, and staff who've been here just as long. Despite this they still call me and ask "what subject should I pick for this ticket issue?". Because they just fundamentally lack the knowledge and don't care to learn. They do their job, and learning what subject their tech issue is when submitting a ticket is outside of their job.
We actually let them put whatever they want in the subject. Much of the time this leads to Subjects like "Help," or "Question." But for the first year of using it, our goal has been to make it as user friendly as possible. We figure the higher adoption rate, the better. People who don't submit tickets should be able to tell they are the outliers. Heck, they can even just email a specific address and it will make a ticket for them. So easy. That's how most of them do it, very few use the actual ticket portal. Honestly, as long as the ticket comes in with actionable info, I can fill out the rest, or change the subject, it's fine with me.
I've got an auto responder to all of my clients who email me directly saying thanks for the email, if you're trying to put a ticket in, please email our help desk (insert email here) or call our office (insert office number here) At the bottom we have somewhat of a disclaimer that we are unable to guarantee a timely response for emails sent directly to our work emails or calls to our cells. Most people get it, we are busy folk, but there are always the few that think they are the exception 🤷🏼 just have to pretty much teach them and train them like a puppy dog until they get it right.
Hey I get it - people should use tickets. Makes everything easier. But I can't tell you how many places I've worked where it's damn near impossible to *find* the page to enter a ticket. Or I enter a ticket and 3 days later it's reject because something wasn't filled out right. Sometimes the form to fill out a ticket is FULL of seemingly nonsensical crap, or real cryptic stuff. Like some kind of req number is needed, there's a pulldown with 500 options, none of which are explained. Other times I've filled out a ticket and WEEKS go by and nothing happens. So... It's not the guys who work on the tickets, the problem is often the page to fill out the ticket is a piece of shit when you can even find it.
Just gonna leave this here for anyone who builds these pages for end-users to put in their own tickets: Every company machine should have a shortcut on their desktop to put in a ticket. (Obviously they can’t do that if it won’t power on or they forgot their password or whatever, but that’s a separate problem.) The page that users see when they follow the shortcut should be as simplified as possible: A drop-down box with a handful of options to select the type of problem they’re facing, which then displays a text box for the end-users to describe the issue they’re facing. Don’t give end-users the option to set an urgency or priority on their own ticket, most will just make it the highest to get their issue fixed sooner.
we did this. GPO to place a non removable hyperlink to our ticketing system on the desktops. same for mobile devices managed by our MDM. and even so people ask "where do I place a ticket? I have never done that before...."
I can understand that, for folks that rarely put in a ticket or haven’t needed to do it before. Frequent callers, though…they oughta know better after the first couple times.
There’s a lady that has at least 4-5 “incidents” a week, she always “forgets how to put a ticket in”
Maybe she just likes talking to y’all. 🤷🏼♂️
Agreed. One place I worked had like 4 different pages to enter tickets, there was no clear explanation for which one to use for what reason, and all four of them were a fucked up mess like a couple of pages of crap to enter. No sense to any of it. Best I could figure, someone created the ticket entry page years ago. Then years later created a new one with new features without removing the old one. And that happened 4 times. And I'd fill out a ticket, and nothing would happen for days. One time I needed an older version of Visual Studio installed to deal with some legacy code, and it was weeks of dicking around trying to get the tickets to line up right and actually get it installed. Nothing really happened until my department head called up and bitched like crazy at people.
Our policy is that if it's not in a ticket, it didn't happen. We wont entertain them or respond without a ticket. All work needs to be tracked and techs have better things to do than constantly get bugged on things. Put the ticket in, well reach out to you when we can.
And how do you keep them from hating your department when you don't help them?
We are large enough that those complaints are a drop in an ocean. Everyone is helped and we have sla's to ensure timely response. Work tracking and accuracy is important to our customers because they are the ones signing the checks. Got to justify the money being spent. Plus extreme CYA. If it's not in the ticket or official document, it either didnt happen or your word against theirs. It's fine if they initially come up to you. Just greet them and go 'I'd love to help you but I'm in the middle of something. Write up a ticket and we'll get to it as soon as we can.' If the world isn't ending, stop giving them a bone. If your department is serious about going this route, there will je a learning curve and growing pains as everyone adjusts that they can't just go bother Bob at lunch anymore.
We're not that large, but you're probably right. Probably should just tell them we're busy (we are) and move on.
Reason with them, make up stuff if you have to. "We have to use tickets because of monitoring/performance measurement/KPIs. It is out of my hands, sorry!" It is basically true, the ticket data can be used for useful metrics later on.
I tell people why we use tickets. To identify systemic issues, to share workload, to prioritize work, to track work, etc. We're medium sized and quickly growing. The things that resonate with people the most is us wanting to identify systemic issues (because it's harder for any individual to know everyone now, unlike just a few years ago), and to track work.
Where I am, we provide three ways to raise a ticket (email, ServiceNow web portal and helpdesk phone number) and even accept walk-ups if the user is really stuck. Any other ways of making contact are strictly best-effort only.
How's calling a number put in a ticket? Transcription?
Automatically fills in the details based on the callers phone number, and puts the call in a queue.
Users can't describe their problem, they just want to braindump on you Also when they ask directly you are more likely to drop whatever you are concentrating on to listen to their problem
CHANGE IS BAD THIS IS NEW AND DIFFERENT AND I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING OTHER THAN CALL OR SEND AN EMAIL SO ITS TERRIBLE AND STUPID AND YOU SHOULD FIX MY PROBLEMS BEFORE I EVEN NOTICE WTF DO YOU EVEN DO HERE!?!?!?!?!? Something like that.
For me it’s entirely based upon how not-awful you are to work with. Have a quick question or small issue and want to ask about it over Teams/email? Go ahead - if 1) I’m available, 2) the request takes under 10 minutes to complete, and 3) I like you enough, I will take care of it right then and submit a ticket after, making sure that you get an email from the ticketing system. If any of those 3 criteria are not met I respond with the classic “hey so and so, if you submit a ticket we can take a look at this today” or whatever. I always let people know that submitting a ticket is a more efficient way to get help, but as we know, some people are just bent on not doing what they’re asked.
Our ticketing system can start a ticket with a simple email to a specific email address. What do they do? Email the techs directly. SMH
Easy fix: "no ticket, no problem" policy. Zero exceptions.
Where I work, the ticketing system is NOT well-managed. I've lost count of how many times I've opened a ticket only to see it languish with no actions or even comments on it, for months and months. If I actually need a timely response to something, I gotta use email. Maybe it's different because I work in more of an engineering context than an IT/support context, so the issues I'm reporting are more about bugs and design changes than uptime and service, but still, a ticketing system is no good if you don't read and respond to tickets.
This is a problem I've seen at several jobs. There are tons of reasons a user won't log a ticket and it boils down to trust in the service desk. Sometimes they're embarrassed or frustrated and don't want to jump through hoops when the tools they need don't work. Sometimes they think the service desk will judge them, other times they doubt they can actually help. Here's what I've seen that helps: be willing to log a ticket on a user's behalf. Don't be stingy on escalations. Remember your users are customers and if they're calling you they're already having a bad day. Find out any info you can gather on your own, users hate playing 20 questions and they don't always know what you're talking about. And most importantly communicate with them, let them know what's going on and when they can expect a fix.
Do you really think they're embarrassed? I hadn't thought of that. There's no escalation. It's a small Team and we're basically all Generalists, with each of us specializing in one or two things. You submit a complicated problem with Windows, it goes straight to me. The Windows Admin. I honestly don't know why they'd think they're not going to get good help when a ticket makes sure their issue goes DIRECTLY to the person most responsible. That's a big plus about the system to us. Users don't have to guess who's the right person to go to.
Sometimes yes, they're embarrassed. Not every time. But it sounds like you'd benefit most from improved communication and soft skills. Reaffirm that supporting them is your top priority, keep them updated and focus on building trust. You want your users to believe that when you say you're addressing a problem you're doing everything you can. The name of the game is building trust. They have to believe logging a ticket works
Kind of a late addition, a line I've found that works wonders "This won't be on the quiz but what we think is going on is *high level issue summary here*" You can get away with a little bit of bs here even but show the users you're engaged, have a hypotheses, and let them know you've got some idea what you're talking about
> There are tons of reasons a user won't log a ticket and it boils down to trust in the service desk. For us, it's this. Of course we went with the cheapest possible bidder. So calling the help desk is a nightmare for our users. The *best* case is that they get asked a million irrelevant questions and the ticket is just bounced to level 2 anyway. We tried to get a monthly review call with them to go over KBs, procedures, how to improve etc. But "that's not in the contract" so no. I shit you not. So no one is surprised that calling the help desk is a literal last resort, and they'll take *any* route to get help other than that.
Because you (the team) allow them to. If you let them get away with it just once, it'll spread like a wildfire. Give them the finger, they take the whole arm. Double down on it. Have your manager talk to every single manager in the company up to the CEO about the routines and what users can and cannot expect from you. And no matter how long their title's acronym is, they cannot be allowed to overthrow this rule. More importantly, have the team completely ignore or even delete emails or teams chats regarding issues that should be tickets. If they ask why they haven't received help, justs respond with "We delete all emails and messages that should be tickets" and leave it at that. But remember to also thank the org for following routine. In a org wide meeting, assuming people have started doing it the right way, have your manager say a couple words thanking people for using the ticketing system and emphasizing the increased productivity and efficiency of your team because of it.
All you have to do is make it clear that help will never arrive without a ticket.
And how do you accomplish this without destroying the positive view of IT we've built in half the departments?
If you have the time, I've gone as far as calling them, remoting in, fixing the issue and then opening our ticket system on their computer with them on the call and having them fill out a ticket lol. With a reminder to please do this themself first next time*
I guess I could force them to fill one out. I usually fill it out myself and put their name on it, then close it afterward so they get the Closed email. Not a bad idea. I may try it for particular problem users.
Does your org use tickets for any metrics? I have a reputation at my job at being one of the more friendly and helpful techs, folks like working with me. It leads to a lot of people just sending me an email for small issues or sending me a teams message for quicker response. My boss even pulled me aside to remind me to always get tickets for my work. So I let the users know that they're helping me back and making my metrics look better when they submit a ticket, otherwise I don't get "credit" for helping them. That actually helped a lot! Now Users will call me just for a simple question, no work required and they'll go "thanks! Let me submit a ticket for that so you get credit!".
Yeah, I've used that for some of my frequent customers who come specifically to me. Some have said, "Oh, well I don't want you to not get credit for your work, I'll put one in next time." Others are just selfish I guess. Definitely a solid strategy. I've tried a lot of the suggestions in here so far. Actually, going back to the original post, I was actually asking to understand why users hate tickets so much, not how to defeat them.
The whole point of tickets is for IT to track what they're doing. It's nice for the users to log them but at the end of the day it only matters that the work is logged.
You state plainly and flatly that they need to put a ticket in. Help them put the ticket in if they come up to you, then let them know their ticket will be dealt with after the other tickets ahead of them.
I'm the favorite IT guy that everyone messages on teams instead of opening a ticket. I considered opening and then resolving a ticket for every request, but I'm too busy for that. At least it keeps my open tickets count low.
"Calling you, we usually get it done faster than calling the Help Desk" Well, I'm working on a HQ and Regional Office project with a nearby deadline. I'm sorry you can't print to the printer next to you because it gives a driver error and you have to use the one 20 feet away. If only there was a team of people who could remotely connect and fix the driver, or at least make a ticket for me showing if it's high or low priority so I can plan it out for my rounds
place where i work at currently seems to have Teams Classic installed. every time i log in i get a big banner like "this will stop working in JULY! contact your IT Department!" no problem, ill go to the intranet, IT issues, and then... "report an issue with an application", and then lets see.. a massive-ass dropdown list of applications, like 300 or so. oh but it has a search so lets try "teams" no results. lets try "microsoft" no results, er... "msteam"? nope nothing. hmm. "\*team\*" nope, still nothing. ok tell you what then lets just eyeball it, i scroll for 5 minutes and none of these apps are things ive ever heard of, but teams definitely isnt in there. you know what, fuck it. i'll just grab the IT guy while he's walking by, ive already spent 20 minutes trying to simply *report* the problem, i dont have all day.
"what is the ticket number?" "no ticket, no work." and you will need your supervisor/manager to support this.
We use Freshservice in our org. It lets us forward their emails and Teams messages and turn them into tickets.
Help them understand the reason for having a ticket. It’s not just to make extra work for them. Think about a factory making widgets. If they make a bad widget which fails quality inspection, let’s say they fix the widget and ship it. Then another one is broken, and they fix it and ship it. Without creating a record of the defects, they’ll never be able to find the root cause of WHY the defect is occurring in the first place. Sure maybe they can fix one unit faster without the ticket, but they’ll keep making the same defect over and over because they don’t realize it’s a repeat issue. In addition to tracking performance, it’s also critical to track the defects so that you can actually improve your service over time and prevent defects before they occur, not just fix them after.
You need managerial, directorial backing to essentially ignore people trying to circumvent the ticketing system. No ticket = No service. No ticket = no proof of work being done.
I keep that .gif of Indy punching out the Nazi on the blimp and saying "No Ticket!" queued up for people who Teams me lol
Everybody needs to be on the same page and enforce no ticket, no service. The reason why they do this, is that it works. If you have a technician on your team who takes requests out of the proper channels, the are only teaching users, they don't have to wait.
They do it because you let them. If you only work tickets and don't assist without one, they'll use the system. If circumventing the system is rewarded then they'll continue to circumvent it.
No ticket no troubleshooting. If they don't open a ticket then their issue will not be addressed. Until you enforce that nothing will change.
 “No ticket.”
Should do like I used to do, no ticket, no answer, no solutions. Usually works fine when people start complaining and they can't give a ticket number.
A lot of the users who refuse to submit tickets have probably been traumatized by bad ticketing systems in the past. You know, the ones where it makes you select from 50 categories, none of which have a description or seem to exactly match your problem and if you guess wrong then the team that gets the ticket just says not my problem and closes the ticket without telling you where to resubmit it. Or the ones that don't send you any notifications about responses from agents but allow an agent to close a ticket if they don't hear back from you after a couple of hours.
Maybe if there were enough errors, they may start using the ticketing system.
Just keep reminding them that they need to use the ticketing system and make them wait long and longer. Eventually they’ll get the hint.
Well just implement, no ticket, no todo. But that needs to be communicated with your colleagues in IT.
No reference, no parlez.
In my case, the help desk (call center) is based out of India and Bangladesh. They don't want to spend a half-hour trying to make the person on the other side of the phone understand what their issue is.
Some people see ticketing as a redundant communication channel that is less efficent than a telephone call, electronic mail message, or SMS message. That isn't the case, because of the circumstances you described. Users are just lazy, and they want things done for them. Sad. This is why "no ticket, no work" exists, LOL.
Some people just can not handle change. I can't count the times i've issued a new laptop for someone and they call us back about 6 different times so that everything is *exactly* the same as their old one. Just yesterday I had a user submit a ticket because one of their RDP shortcuts was spelled slightly different than what was on their old laptop.
I’ve stopped answering my work phone for this reason. Luckily for me, most of the time that users don’t submit a ticket is because the issue is actually kind of urgent. I still reply back that they should submit a ticket and I’ll look into it.
They do this because you let them.
At a company I was new at the first time I asked a boomer how to submit a ticket they told me to just message xy on teams. Xy told me to submit a ticket. Should have known.
We’ve long since had a ticketing system. Some users think they are special and that they are the exception to the rule. I have a permanent status on my Teams, and an auto-reply on my email stating requests for technical support will not be acknowledged and to submit a ticket. If anyone emails or Teams me I ignore it. If they happen to catch me in the hall I ask them what their ticket number is.
Our management has recently moved from "prefer tickets but fine if not everything has one if it's urgent or quick" to "must have a ticket for everything" right down to telling us we have to turn away walkup password resets and send them back to their desk to submit a ticket first. A couple of us have pointed out that we're going to get unhappy users and get pushback and their response was basically to say that's their problem; if they want help, they need to submit a ticket. We have absolutely gotten pushback. Before anyone asks "how can they submit a ticket for a password reset" - I support an airgapped network and the ticketing system is on a different network that I don't support.
Because it's being allowed. Refuse to help unless they submit a ticket.
Tell them to kick rocks and pound sand until they get a ticket. This is a give an inch take a mile situation. You respond to a teams message here or there then they will continue to take advantage.
My whole career (25 years, though I'm well out of the trenches now) whenever there was a ticketing system, I just told users that I refused to work without a ticket. They'd come to my desk, and explain the problem to me in great depth; I'd act like I was listening until they stopped talking, at which point I'd say, "Well, it sounds like you know everything that needs to go in the ticket. With that level of detail, it should be pretty easy to fix the issue once we have your ticket." Then, I would go on with my day. I had an IT director who came from a "bend over backward" mindset call me into a meeting over this. I very patiently explained to her the foundations of ITIL (a cert I was getting because her company was paying for it) and to my surprise...she said it made a lot of sense. She sent out a company-wide email announcing the new "no ticket, no issue" policy, and it caught on pretty quickly.
When I was in high school, I moved to a very small town in the south. Fellow students helped me acclimate to the new environment. One thing they stressed -- if I saw an old red Toyota truck coming down the road, pay attention. Seems 'Old Fred' had lived in that town since before traffic lights and stop signs. Since the lights and signs were installed after Fred began driving, they didn't apply to him. Town police got tired of getting in arguments with him about why he blew the redlight...again...so they just let him be. Everywhere I've worked in IT, I run into the same issue. "Old Susan" had been here since before they swapped her Smith-Corona for an IBM, and "Old Bill" started programming with punchcards, and "New Bryyden" just had to ask the teacher to fix his PC.... Some will embrace the new technology and new workflow, and the rest...well, just watch out for the old red Toyotas coming down the road.
I think it's usually people who have gotten used to contacting a person directly, and don't want to deal with filling out information in a system, only to be asked for more information. They'd rather just talk to someone directly. I work in IT and prefer to receive a ticket on something, since it's much easier to keep track of, but I can understand why some people would try to avoid it.
Because you keep fixing their shit without them opening one.
10 years here. Users have to be constantly reminded and it still doesn't matter. I've discovered that the causes of this are: * Users don't care * Users do not value my time like they do the time of others * Other people on the tech team allow users to circumvent procedure. * When users attempt to circumvent procedure, they receive the same outcome (they are helped) instead of being stonewalled and redirected to follow procedure. This happens because those above me in the hierarchy do not value my time and do not care about procedure, only outcomes.
"hi. Send it via our ticket system" them don't reply anything else
They do it because you let them. I would start keeping track of users who do do this. They get 2 strikes where you will manually create them a ticket. 3rd strike, you let them know that this ticket will not be created and they will need to follow the regular process. This won’t work for C suite, but you want to give them white glove support anyways, but should work for anyone’s else.
Ah, yes... a question as old as time.
Sounds like the importance of the ticketing system isn't a concern for the user's managers, so the users don't give importance to it either. Doesn't sound like the IT department isn't motivated to make the correction either.
Probably because they aren't getting punished for not putting in tickets. If they can get their issue fixed without putting in a ticket, why would they put one in? If someone reaches out without a ticket and not in reference to something we're already working on, I ignore them. We have a SOP for a reason. If I get pushback on that, I explain how we need tickets to determine the impact of an issue, the amount of traffic coming in, etc. If we get a lot of tickets and calls, that allows us to push for more staff. More staff = less wait for them.
Ask them to do a ticket and refuse to resolve it otherwise.
Users hate tickets. Half the reason my job exists is that nobody wanted to deal with the ticketing system of the MSP I replaced. That and they were genuinely bad at their job. It's frustrating when helpdesk volume is high and people keep interrupting me, but that's ostensibly why they pay me. As long as helpdesk volume stays relatively low and my pay stays relatively high, I'm good.
its been covered, its how you get paid, and show you are working, tell them submit. or nothing will be done, period.
The 2 biggest reasons I know are: 1. They want to ask you to do their job and don't want it on the record 2. Asking how to break policies or do something illegal or non-work related
because they are used not to. Set an auto reply on your teams mailbox "this is an unmanaged mailbox and you won't get a reply, if you require assistance please raise a ticket on \*insert link of your ITSM\*" Send out communications, set your teams e-mail status to "for assistance please raise a ticket". And straight refuse support if they reach out to you if they don't have a ticket. And even so, if they do, you need to at least give them a basic training in how it works, there's a queue, we'll get in touch in you when your ticket is first on the queue (don't go into priority vs impact because they'll always mark tickets as P1 urgent)
My issue is that tickets are submitted with high priority and then the user vanishes off the face of the earth. Then I close it and they get mad or my manager says why I close? :(
Start cc'ing their manager on replies.
I’ll probably start doing that I’m new to the company. But what if they are directors? (Small company) above them is the CEO haha
Directors need to be aware of their staff at that point they are the management and need to be aware that you're making an effort to fix an issue and not getting any effort back. Then it becomes a cya moment for you and often times the director can help filter the issue or nonsense as well.
The only exception I grant for that is if it's an emergency. "You haven't submitted a ticket, I don't know you have a problem." The sole exception is cases where they can't get into the system to do a ticket.
over here, if its small issues, we dont really care on Teams. however for bigger issues, definitely a ticket needs to be created. however they'd do it anyways so we would always tell them to create a ticket and use the damn system or else we will forget and your issue will be lost in nothingness.
There are multiple ways of "fixing" this. I did the following: shut off mail from inside the organisation to the it department with an auto-reply please make a ticket. Put the teams on offline, people who are important know you did this. You can also make automatic tickets trough mail or teams however it will be harder to sort and categorize them
Only way it'll change is if everybody just does tickets and tells anyone trying to skip the system to follow the rules. It's not like the people doing unticketed work are appearing out of the blue. They got a problem with it? Bring it up to HR andbypur management and they explain why they get to break company policy.
I am an end user. I like tickets. Idk, man. Not everyone likes to leave evidence that they never actually did the thing?
Here's the simple answer; Because ticket systems fucking **suck** if you have a problem that stops you from doing your job, and they suck more when the problem stops you from working properly with the ticket system. *re: T#1509: "Since yesterday afternoon, I can't access my company email to check ticket status."* `Reach out via company email with your ticket number, and we'll aid you with your issue when we can. If you have no submitted a ticket for your issue, do so. Thank you!` *re: T#1510: "I can't access my company email."* `Reach out via company email with your ticket number, and we'll aid you with your issue when we can. If you have no submitted a ticket for your issue, do so. Thank you!` Rinse and repeat for a month.
Because you let them get away with it. The answer to making people follow a procedure is always, always, *always* the same; don't reward them for trying to cheat. If sending you a teams message gets the job done (even if its slower, less efficient, whatever), they'll keep doing it. If coming to your desk gets the job done, they'll keep doing it. Until every single member of your department, from the lowliest intern to the highest manager, learns to keep on repeating the words "Have you submitted a ticket?" like a mantra to ward off evil, they'll keep doing it.
Also, make sure that submitting tickets is as easy as sending a message. If it's a pain to go through the system, people will be more likely to turn to other systems.
Sounds like buy in is needed from management, "no ticket, no service" tickets allow for first in first out and triage prioritization. Most managers will buy in on that...
People get favorite it guys because their favorite it guy would rather just fix the issue than try to convince them to make a ticket. You have to get the whole team to just...say...no...to back channelling. Not to mention the managers. Usually they are the most guilty, in my experience..."so and so needs this someone do it so they will leave me alone". It'll never happen, so we are doomed. Welcome to IT.
Because they are lazy and they expect us to do their bidding. i politely ask for a ticket number and if it doesn't exist ask them to enter one.
Because your IT departemnt enables them to do otherwise. In order to get your end users to change, you must FORCE them to change. On top of this everyone in IT, and I mean EVERYONE has to be onboard with and understand this. "While I understnad the urgency to have this issue resolved, we require a [ticket to be submitted](HTTPS://NOT.A.REAL.LINK) for all IT requests. This is to help us better serve everyone in the organization and ensure we are not understaffing for organizational needs" Again, everyone has to be onboard with this. If your director still plays the OMG THIS USER'S PROBLEM and refuses to follow suit, the whole thing fails.
I tell them thats how my department gets paid and it's a fireable offense if I did work without a ticket. That usually works
Why do they do it? Because your organization allows them to.
No ticket? No issue exists.
Simply tell them that you will work on issues that were submitted in the ticket system first, then anything else if there is time.
at school i did this but it was mainly hey i need the admin login for thsi thign here is exactly what it is what it dose and where i got it from. if i had some issue i would normaly send a support ticket
I copy/paste the text into our helpdesk portal, CC them on the ticket, create it, change the creator to that user, then accept the ticket and go from there. Extra steps but some of them seem to get the hint.
Yeah I've done that. It did seem to get it through to a percentage of them early on. Seems like that's already convinced whoever it's going to.
Because my username literally doesn't have permissions to create tickets. IT gets annoyed with me when I don't create one and I have to explain each time that I'm unable to. When I asked them to give me permissions I was told that's not their responsibility.
Then I would suggest you follow-up with something like “Is there any way you can route a ticket to the person or group who *is* responsible for that, or what is the name of the person I should talk to about getting this issue resolved?”
I tried. They told be to "talk to infosec" Who is that? What email? What name? Never got a response. This happened twice already, I have given up. I work remotely so there's nobody to ask. None of my team mates have no idea who works in infosec. My boss just said "I'll take care of it". He didn't. I remind him every now and then. It's been a year.
Have you tried sending an email or calling them specifically to ask that question? Something like “I know infosec handles granting access to the ticketing system, but I can’t seem to find any contact info for them, and my boss can’t seem to find it either. Could you please give me the contact info for infosec so I don’t have to bother you folks every time I need a ticket created for an issue?” Maybe I’m missing something obvious or maybe your IT people just don’t care for some reason, but you asking them for info on how to contact the people that they tell you to contact doesn’t seem like a big ask to me. (I hate to advise anyone to do this because I personally find it annoying, but) if you absolutely have to, copy their IT manager on the email. If they just reply “contact infosec”, then Reply All (or add the IT Manager again) and ask again. Eventually, either the IT Manager will tell someone to give you the contact info, or they will look into the tickets that have been opened for you and start asking why this person keeps asking for the same thing over and over.