In a working age dominated by streams of endless email, often carelessly composed, it’s easy to send rapid fire requests for assistance to your nearest service team. Give them a helping hand and raise that service ticket the right way – your service team will thank you for it, and you will probably get a faster resolution!
When you don’t have to speak with anyone to request help, you are missing the important guidance questions that naturally form part of any conversation where a subject is being explained to another individual. Raising service requests using email is very easy, but should result in no less contribution from you than would be made in a one to one conversation.
Remember some basic email principles
The subject line needs to describe the problem. There’s no point opening a service request with a subject line like ‘help please!’. You are emailing a service desk – they know you need help! Make the subject line a concise description of your problem. Subject lines like ‘report fails to complete with error number 1001’, or ‘computer fails to start and reports disk missing’ are so much more useful and informative than ‘help please!’.
Keep your message body equally concise. You don’t need to write a book about the problem, but instead offer a clear summary of the request that can be quickly read and digested by a reader.
Describe your request with care and thought
Consider each of the following as essential components of a service desk request. Omit any one, and you can be sure the service desk will want to ask them before the can provide a resolution.
- Who are you – what is your role and the context of your activity
- Where can you be found / contacted
- What you were trying to achieve – put the task into context and what steps (if any) you have taken in order to resolve by yourself
- When the problem occurred – sometimes the time of the problem is relevant, particularly if it happens to be affecting others too
- Why is it important that your problem is fixed – are there specific deadlines that apply to your work? Will the broader business function be impacted by the problem you describe?
Inform the service team of changes to the situation
It’s really helpful for you to explain changes in the situation to the service team – when you do, your request might be re-prioritised as a result. This makes the work of any service team member much easier to prioritise. Remember that service team staff will be supporting many other users in addition to you. Problem fixed itself? Update the ticket and close it, with a suitable explanation. Problem changed or grown in significance? Update the ticket with a suitable explanation, including any changes to the possible impact of the issue.