The Importance of Triage
Every process has a point of entry, the point or place at which new work is considered and brought onboard. In the ticketing world, whether it’s for a benefits team, IT team or anyone else, this point of entry also represents a challenge; frequently requests come in that are missing information. As these move through the process they start to gum up the works as downstream folks may be missing critical information and have to go find it. At best this slows things down, at worst it results in a catastrophic failure.
This is where triage comes in. I think of this as a sub-process that runs as soon as new work enters the queue. Exactly what is performed here can vary, however, there are some standard questions that should be asked and actions that should be taken regardless of specifics.
Is the request clear?
Many times a request comes in and it’s hard to tell what it’s for. Maybe the name is poor, something like “New report request”. New report request for what?... for who?... when is it needed? Or maybe they’re asking for something sensitive but don’t provide any reason why. Regardless, we should always ask ourselves “Do I understand what this request is for?”. If I cannot answer “yes”, I follow up with the customer and ask for more information.
Is any information missing?
Similar to understanding the request, we need to ask if there’s enough information to take action. Asking for a change to report, for example, is useless without knowing what the change should be. Asking for access to a system without providing what type of access is similarly useless. Taking a moment to ask yourself if there is sufficient information to take action (or for the next person who gets the ticket to take action) is the next critical step. If you think any is missing, just reach out to the customer and ask for clarification.
Who should work on this?
Once we’ve got enough info on the request, we need to then determine who should work on it. Sometimes this is REALLY simple; there’s only one person to give the ticket to. Other times, this can be very complex if there’s multiple available agents to help out. In these circumstances figuring out who can/should work on the ticket can take a bit of thought since we have to take into mind things like workload and experience. In these scenarios I find it most helpful to have a list of who is trained/experienced in specific areas, and have access to everyone’s workload. These two pieces of info can make it easier to figure out who to assign the ticket to.
While triage does take time, it does streamline things quite a bit. By ensuring the ticket has sufficient information and is assigned to the most appropriate resource we set ourselves up for success. Even better, it helps build trust-based relationships with our customers by demonstrating we care about their needs.
