Service desk, incidents & requests
How this is scored
How tickets come in and get resolved: intake by email, portal, chat, phone and Microsoft Teams or Slack, incidents and service requests told apart, categories, priorities and an impact-urgency matrix, assignment rules and queues, SLAs with escalation and business hours, major incidents, templates and canned responses, a knowledge base for agents, automations and workflows, time tracking on tickets, and reports and dashboards on volume, resolution time and SLA compliance.
0 — Not a ticketing or service desk product; requests cannot be recorded and worked in it.
3 — Tickets from email and a web form with status, priority and assignment; SLAs, automation and reporting are basic or not described.
5 — Multi-channel intake (email, portal, chat or Teams), incidents and service requests told apart, assignment rules and queues, SLAs with escalation and business hours, an agent knowledge base, rule-based automations, and standard reports on volume, resolution time and SLA compliance.
8 — A visual workflow builder for any ticket type, major incident handling with communication to affected users, SLAs per service, customer and contract, skills- or load-based routing, time tracking on tickets, AI suggestions or classification with what they do stated, custom dashboards and scheduled reports, and a mobile app for agents.
10 — A service desk an organisation of thousands runs on: every workflow, form and SLA configurable without code and versioned, omnichannel intake with one history per requester, AI features documented with their data use and limits, operational level agreements and underpinning contracts tracked, and every report reproducible from an exportable ticket history.
The Service Desk Lead
The ITSM pages document incident and service request management as separate ITIL practices, SLAs with KPI dashboards and BI reports, a knowledge base the AI searches for ready-made solution suggestions, and AI that classifies and routes incoming tickets by real business impact with its behaviour spelled out; low-code workflow and BPMN 2.0 modelling let my team rebuild processes ourselves. What I miss for a Monday-morning operation is any description of multi-channel intake such as Teams or chat, SLA escalation with business hours, major incident handling and time tracking on tickets. 1 2 3