7 tips for improving the Remedyforce user experience via ticket categorization
By Kedar Zavar, Senior Consultant, Cloudaction
Category is a Remedyforce attribute that, when fully leveraged, provides a better experience for business users and support staff. As a Remedyforce consultant at Cloudaction, I have worked on multiple small and large Remedyforce implementations, and even a few BMC SDE/Magic implementations, and I have seen firsthand how Category can be leveraged to maximize Remedyforce’s business value. Here are seven tips for using Category to improve the Remedyforce user experience.
1. Keep it simple for business users
To fully leverage the value of self-service, you need your business users to effectively categorize the issues they are reporting. In order to get accurate categorization for Incidents submitted through self-service, you should keep it simple. Build a category tree with simple, straightforward names and avoid technical jargon, acronyms or references your business users will not understand. You can configure Remedyforce to only display categories that would be relevant for business users.
2. Auto-categorize with Incident and Service Request templates
To further simplify things, leverage the powerful Incident templates in Remedyforce to enable common issues to be easily submitted by end users while the system auto-categorizes them and routes them to the correct group. Service Request templates can also be used to auto-categorize and assign common requests.
3. Review, revise and update your Category structure
Review your Category structure periodically based on changes to the business, including new systems and increased support areas. Metrics can be very helpful in gauging the effectiveness of your current Category structure. If, for example, there is a high volume of Incidents in a specific area, consider splitting that Category or creating sub-categories to more accurately classify the issues and make correct staff assignments. Effective categorization should help you identify problems on specific categories, take proactive action to perform Root Cause Analysis for permanent resolution, and thereby reduce ticket volume. Lastly, avoid random changes or additions to your Category structure. Category changes need to go through the proper approval chain or else your category structure may yield limited results. And remember to use your sandbox for proof of concepts and testing for significant changes, and to solicit user feedback.
4. Make Category a required field
Even if you have a well-designed Category structure, you may find staff and end users skipping this step. So, you need to make populating the category field a requirement for both support staff and business users.
5. Make the Closure Category field a requirement
Closure Category is an important classification for reporting purposes, so move this field on the form and make it required before closing any record. Closure Category provides valuable trend data on how issues were closed. Remedyforce has the Closure Category field available out of the box, and that you can add or modify the values.
6. Leverage Category type for reporting
Category type is a powerful way to correlate data. Think of Category types as “buckets” you use to collect similar categories together for simplified reporting. For example, you might group categories into types like “Applications” or “Hardware” to easily report on the larger group without manually selecting multiple categories. Building reports by Category Type also ensures new categories are automatically represented in reports where you are not showing all categories.
7. Leverage Force.com flexibility to create tiered categorization
Leverage the power of Remedyforce and the Force.com platform to enable a tiered structure. Without writing any code, you can use dependent pick list capability to establish relationships between Categories and other fields. Some of our clients use this capability to quickly deploy a Category/Type/Item structure.
I hope you find these Category tips helpful. At Cloudaction, our goal is to help you get maximum value from your Remedyforce implementation. We welcome your comments and suggestions. Please reach out to the Cloudaction team at info@cloudaction.com if there is a specific Remedyforce topic you’d like us to cover.