OTRS Basic Training

5/24/2018 OTRS Basic Training

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August 29, 11 | 5 OTRS Group Author: Hauke Bttcher, Director Partner Management [email protected]

Introduction to OTRS Help Desk

MODULE 1


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.1 Why a Help Desk Solution Leads to Higher EfficiencyTypical pain points! Working with local email inbox(es)

! Customers always contacting their preferredservice buddy instead of a SPOC

! Manage huge amounts of requests efficiently

! Customer self-service support

! Lack in transparency in communication

! Limited service resources

! Service performance reporting

! Integration to existing IT landscape

! Field service support

leading to the following consequences! Requests get lost or are answered late

! SLA breaches causing penalties

! Limited service resources wasting time forroutine tasks instead of focusing on value add

services

! Managing service quality and costs is impossible

! Customer dissatisfaction

! Dissatisfied service staff

! Low service quality

! High service costs


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Main benefits of OTRS Help Desk for your daily work ! Transparent and traceable customer communication

! No lost service requests

! Relief of routine tasks - you focus on value added services and tasks

! Increased amount of service requests due to customer self-service capabilities

! Cross-process support of an integrated knowledge base

! Cross-process integration of a CMDB granting access to affected CI#s (ITSM only)

! Powerful event-based notification feature assist to avoid SLA breaches

! Integration in your current IT landscape and systems used

! Transparency on service performance

! Increases customer satisfaction

! Increased service staff motivation

! Increased service quality

! At lower service costs

1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.1 Why a Help Desk Solution Leads to Higher Efficiency


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is a Ticket?A ticket contains all the information that is tied to a specificcustomer service request or incident, including a

customers initial request, internal communication -betweenyour service agents - and external communication, i.e.

interactions with the customer and/or third party serviceproviders.

A ticket has attributes like:

! Ticket number

! Creation date

! Customer ID

! From: / To: / CC: / BCC:

! Type

! Service and/or SLA assigned

! Subject / Text body

!

State

! Owner / Responsible

! Priority

! Time unitsand more

Typical channels to create a new ticket:

! OTRS customer web front-end

! email to [email protected] OTRS opens

automatically as a new ticket

! phone, i.e. the agent will open a phone ticket to documentthe call

! fax or SMS

Attachments can be uploaded to a ticket in order to provide

the service team or the customer with additionalinformation.

Customer data and Ticket Information are displayed on the

right hand bar of a ticket.

The ticket number that will be automatically assigned by

OTRS when a ticket is created, is a unique identifier for aspecific case that your service organization is working on.

A common algorithm to create ticket numbers is:

Year.Month.Day.SystemID.Checksum, for example201105161092000044.


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is an Article? New articles within a ticket may result from:

! External inbound and outbound communication of your

service organization with the customer and/or third partyservice providers.

! Internal communication, called notes, from your involvedservice agents and/or managers.

! Notifications that result from ticket actions that you

initiate, e.g. queue moves,assigning / changing anowner and/or a responsibleperson, priority changes or

setting pending reminders.

! Alerts if a monitoring solution is in use to monitor specificcomponents in your IT infrastructure.

The first article of your ticket usually is the initial servicerequest or incident report sent by your customer or

documented by one of your service agents.

Unless a service request isn#t resolved during the firstcontact, a ticket regularly consists off more than one article.

Articles are listed in the ticket zoom view and are numberedconsecutively

Depending on the type of an article it has attributes like:

! Note type

! Creation date

! Created by

! From: / To: / CC: / BCC:

! Inform (involved) Agents

!Subject / Text body

! Attachment

! Pending date

! Review required

! Working time unitsand more


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is an Agent? Aservice agent is a member of your service organizationwhich has access to and is working with the OTRS Agent

web front-end.

Depending on the usage of OTRS in your specific case that

may involve members of:

! Management

! IT service

! Sales representatives

! Product support

! Technical field service

! External service providers, e.g. repair services

! External sales channel partners

!Call Centers

! Project teams

! Software developers

! Facility Managers .and more

What is a Customer?A customer is entitled to file service requests or incidentreports regarding your products and services to your

service organization. If granted access by your serviceorganization, the customer has access to the Self Service

Portal, i.e. the OTRS customer web front-end.

The ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) separates users that are

entitled to make use of your services from customers. In thesense of ITIL a customer is a role that defines requirementsfor services that the users can request, it communicates

and negotiates conditions as well as orders them from aservice organization.

In this case we do not use this strict definition but will name

each requester a customer. Depending on the concreteusage of OTRS in your specific case that may involve

members of:

! Your company#s employees requesting services or filingincident reports

! End customers using your services and products

! Partners or third party service providers without direct

access to the OTRS agent web front-end


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is a Queue? In general aqueue reflects a specific organizational area ofresponsibility or a specific part of your service process

chain. Queues map your service organization and relatedprocesses to the OTRS system and help you to route

incoming service requests efficiently and in a structuredway through your service process.

One queue might be the inbox of your Service Desk or CallCenter where all service request or incident reports areinitially filed by your customers. Subsequent queues can be

hierarchically organized by team structure, region, topic orskills required to resolve a certain category of assignedcustomers request.

Tickets are created, worked, stored or moved in queues.I.e. each ticket is assigned to a certain queue.

OTRS supports access management for customers,agents, groups and roles to specific queues. It#s easy tosetup queues that are accessible only for dedicated agents

that are assigned to a specific role (e.g. 1st level supportagent) being part of a specific group (e.g. 1stlevel support)

which is responsible to work within a specific area ofresponsibility, i.e. the queue (e.g. 1st level support), basedon their skills.

Figure: Example queue structure


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is a Role? Roles and groups are powerful features to efficientlymanage access rights for multiple agents in complex

service organizations. Agents are assigned to rolesreflecting their access level e.g. role: 1st level support,

Service Manager or Change Builder.

A role is then assigned to a minimum of one group that

includes the specific rights to access queues, modules orfeatures.

What is a Group? Agroup contains a couple of specific rights and is assignedto one or more roles, providing these roles with the rights.

At the same time a group is assigned to one or morespecific queues. Access rights are:

! Read only access to tickets, entries & queues of this group

! Right to move tickets or entries between queues or areas that

belong to this group

! Right to create tickets or entries in the queues or areas of thisgroup

! Right to update the owner of tickets or entries in queues or

areas that belong to this group

! Right to change the priority of tickets or entries in queues or

areas that belong to this group

! Full read and write access on tickets or entries in the queuesor areas that belong to this group

Using the concept of roles and groups makes it quite easyto assign new employees specific bundles of rights withoutthe need to assign each right individually. Also in case of

changes to the rights assigned to a specific group theyhave to be done only once and all roles assigned to the

group including the agents assigned to these roles haveaccess based on the new rights.


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is an Owner? The owner is the agent to whom the ticket is currentlyassigned, i.e. the one who#s working the ticket.

Owners have full access rights to the ticket and aretherefore able to execute all actions related to the ticket,

e.g. answer customers, add notes, move the ticket toanother queue etc.

The owner will be informed automatically via email in case

of new notes. Receiving notifications require the rightconfiguration of your preferences.

What is a Responsible?A responsible can be assigned to provide a second agentthe same rights to the ticket without being the owner. That

may be useful to temporarily get another agent involved foran answer to the customer and withdraw the access later.

Until assigned as a responsible the agent automaticallyget#s notifications on a tickets status, changes or updates,

i.e. the responsible can follow the communication in orderto take action if necessary.

What is a Watch List? Agents or supervisors may put specific tickets on theirindividual watch list to follow the ongoing interaction and

communication of that ticket.

The ticket watch feature give the watcher automatic access

rights to the ticket like assigning a responsible.

Specific groups can be defined and granted the exclusiverights to watch tickets.


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is a Ticket State?OTRS allows you to change a tickets state while processinga service request or incident. Ticket states have an impact

on the systems behavior.

Default states provided by OTRS are:

! New: State for tickets that have just been created.

! Open: Default state for tickets that have just beenassigned to queues and/or an agent.

! Pending reminder: OTRS allows to set a pendingreminder to a ticket. When the defined pending time

expires, the ticket owner receives a reminder notificationby email. If the ticket is not locked to an agent, thereminder will be sent to all agents that have access to

tickets in this queue in order to guarantee that a ticket isprocessed according to the agreed SLAs and tasks

scheduled. Reminder tickets will be sent only duringbusiness hours as defined in the systems workingcalendar, but repeatedly every 24 hours until the ticket

state is changed by the agent. This state does not stopescalation time calculation.

! Pending auto close (-): Tickets will be automatically set toa new state $closed unsuccessfully! when the defined

pending time expires. This state does not stop escalationtimecalculation.

! Pending auto close (+): Tickets will be automatically set

to a new state $closed successfully! when the definedpending time expires. This state does not stop escalation

timecalculation.

! Merged: This state applies for tickets that have beenmerged with other tickets.

! Closed successfully: The final closing state for ticketsthat have been successfully resolved. Depending on your

configuration, you may or may not be able to reopenclosed tickets.

! Closed unsuccessfully: The final closing state for tickets

that have NOT been successfully resolved. Dependingon your configuration, you may or may not be able to

reopen closed tickets.


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is a locked Ticket? Locking a ticket indicates that an agent is assigned to theticket as owner who is currently working the ticket.

Your administrator can define an unlock time for a queue. Ifthe agent locks a ticket and does not close it before the

unlock time is reached, the ticket will be automaticallyunlocked and made available for other agents to avoid SLA

breaches.

If configured this way, OTRS may also reassign a ticket thatwas already closed to the same agent again when the ticket

is reopened. This ensures that a follow up for a ticket isprocessed by the agent that has previously worked on thatcase.

What is a Priority? The priority of a ticket indicates the relevance of a specific

case in relation to other cases. Priority will affect the sortsequence of tickets in a queue view and will also be shownby different color codes tied to a ticket.

Your system may use own priority classifications, thedefault priorities coming with OTRS are:

! 1 very low

! 2 low

! 3 normal

! 4 high

! 5 very high

Priority changes are part of those kind of eventsthat can beconfigured as trigger for an event based notification.

Priorities neither have an impact on escalations nor is therea relation to SLAs in the standard of OTRS. They simplyhelp to classify and rank a ticket. In such cases that require

a specific response time e.g. one of your top managersrequested a service, it is recommended to work based onservices and assign the management a specific VIP service

level to guarantee a quick resolution.


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat are Escalations?Escalations indicate threatening SLA breaches and intendto warn the agent and/or managers that are responsible for

the service quality based on defined thresholds.

Escalations can be defined for each queue or based on

Service Level Agreements (SLA) that are assigned todefined services. The way escalations are defined in your

service organization depend on whether you are usingservices to categorize your tickets, i.e. whether you workbased on a service catalog.

Depending on your OTRS configuration, escalations resultin an escalation notification to all agents that have selectedthe queue in their $MyQueues# preferences or agents and

service managers that have read-write permissions on thatqueue.

There are three (3) types of escalation time settings:

! First Response Time: In order to meet an agreed initial

response time for service requests or incident reports,the ticket escalates if the defined first response timeexpired without any documented external

communication.

!

Update Time: During the ongoing interaction with acustomer, this escalation time setting leads to anescalation if there is no recorded follow-up by email orthe customer portal within the defined period.

! Solution Time: If you agreed on a maximum resolutiontime, a ticket escalates if it isn$t closed before the defined

time frame expired.


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is a Service? A serviceis a bundle of value add benefits that you offer acustomer to solve that customers current needs. The

service might be the product you sell, might be tied to theproducts you have sold to a customer or is provided to

support other business units of your company to allow themto efficiently meet their goals instead of spending time onwhat is your core competence. The customer, regardless

whether it is an internal or external one might have agreedwith your service organization on specific service

characteristics like quality, availability and for sure the price.

In OTRS services are used to classify tickets, i.e. servicerequests filed by a customer. Depending on a customers

permission to request a specific service, the user or theagentwill assign a service from a list of available services

while creating the ticket.

There is a service level agreement (SLA) tied to each

service, specifying the quality of a service.

Services can be organized hierarchically i.e. top levelservices might have sub level services representing your

complete service offering.

The whole of all services organized in a hierarchical wayincluding SLAs and prices is called a service catalog.

What is a Service Level Agreement?Service level agreements (SLA) specify the service by

defining quality and quantity.

SLAs can be service-based, i.e. tied to one service for allcustomer or customer-based, i.e. tied to all services of one

customer.

Typical characteristics of a SLA used in OTRS are:

! The service(s) it is assigned to

! The underlying working time calendar of your team todefine service level windows. The calendar specifies

start and end of your typical service availability per dayas well as vacation

! Escalation times, i.e. First Response Time, Update Time,Solution Time

! Minimum time between Incidents, i.e. how much time

must pass by between two incidents being reported inrelation to a defective service without the SLA being

violated.

As escalation times can be set per queue or by SLAs, theescalations defined in a SLA dominate the ones defined per

queue if there is a conflicting situation where both conceptsare used.


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1. Introduction to OTRS Help Desk 1.2 TerminologyWhat is an Underpinning Contract (UC)?

The Underpinning Contract is a legally binding agreementwith an external 3rd party service provider focusing on a

share of services that your service organization agreed onwith your end customer. The Underpinning Contract fits thestructure of the SLA with your end customer.

What is an Operation Level Agreement (OLA)?

The Operational Level Agreement is an agreement betweeninternal service delivery units of an IT organization

regarding the delivery of shares of the services that sum upto the SLA agreed on with the end customer. OLA #s do not

contain any legally binding elements.

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