The six stages of a service desk ticket

1. Logged. A request arrives through email, a portal, chat or a phone call and becomes a ticket with a requester, a description and a time stamp.
2. Categorised. The ticket gets a type (incident or request), a category and a priority. Good categories make everything after this faster.
3. Routed. The ticket reaches the team or person who can work it, based on category, skills, workload or schedule.
4. Resolved. Someone, or something, fixes the issue or fulfils the request and tells the requester.
5. Closed. The ticket is confirmed as done, by the requester, by an agent or by a rule.
6. Reviewed. The desk learns from the ticket: a knowledge article is written or updated, or similar incidents are grouped into a problem to find the root cause.

At the edges. Logging is the easiest stage to automate, because channels such as portals and chat collect structured fields. Resolution of routine requests, such as password resets, is the next most common claim. Closure is the least automated: in our Lifecycle Automation Census only one of nine vendors documents it on its public pages. For the rest, closure depends on an agent or on a rule an admin sets up.

Because it is the only stage that reduces future tickets. A desk that resolves the same issue every week without recording a fix or opening a problem record will keep resolving it. When you look at a service desk, check how it turns resolved tickets into knowledge and whether it can link incidents to a problem. See the ITSM glossary for the terms.

This table counts, for each stage, how many of the nine service desks we rank document automation on the pages we read, and how many describe it only in general terms. It is generated from the same data as the census on the home page.

Use it to set expectations. A stage that few vendors document is a stage to test yourself in a trial rather than take on trust.

Bring three real tickets and ask the vendor to walk each through all six stages, saying at each one whether a person or the tool does the work. Our trial plan turns this into a two-week test.