How Many Parties Does It Take to Manage an Incident?
Posted by Jody Pellerin on Mon, Apr 18, 2011 @ 06:08 PM
No, not THAT kind of party!
Do you have the type of product or service where resolving a customer's problem may take a team of resources?
Even if it only takes two or three it can get difficult to collaborate, especially if the people involved don't actually work together. You need to be able to have all of the information from all resources in one place where everyone...you, the customer, and all the responsible investigators...can access it, either for modification or simply for monitoring.
Better yet, what if this capability is built into your incident management solution? It is possible with Tracker 6, our latest version of customer service and support software.
It's called Incident Parties. PhaseWare has made it possible to assign any number of resources: outside vendors, partners, subcontractors, whoever is needed to resolve the issue. Once the ticket has been opened, you can assign the needed resources to that ticket, make it possible for them to access the issue through Self Service Center, read and enter information, and stay up to date on progress.
Each resource will be assigned a role in the incident....such as "Driver", "Electrician," and so forth. Each can be placed on a distribution list...or not. You can choose whether the party will have access to the incident through Self Service Center. Or not.
Best of all, you can rate these parties so if and when you need someone in the future for something similar, you will already have an idea of how well that party performed in that role. After awhile you will even have the ability to ask the software to suggest parties for particular issues based on the ratings gathered over time.
There are metrics involved too. As the number of incident parties and ratings build up, you can see how many times a party has been assigned to a ticket for a particular customer or over all. You will have an average of the ratings in a role and a list of open incidents assigned to a party.
Now all those disparate resources can become a well oiled machine and you can track who did what and when. And whether you will want to invite them to your party another time.
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