A ticket is a product

A ticket looks like a record. It is actually a product with one customer: the next person who has to act on it.

If that person has to chase missing details, the ticket was a bad product.

What goes wrong

Most tickets start as a short message. A technician needs the site, the unit, the fault and the contact. Without them, someone calls the customer, asks again and waits. Every step adds hours.

The fix I used

At Tessol, tickets raised through Amazon carried full information only 30% of the time. After tightening the intake, 79% did. The same people, the same customers. The only change was what the first form asked for.

Design the intake like a product

• List what the next person needs to act.
• Make those fields required, and nothing else.
• Check the result weekly, not once.

This is also the reasoning behind building a ticketing platform instead of renting one. A tool you control lets you change the intake in a day.

Good service starts with a complete first message.