Align Ticket Categories with Service Items

Help me understand why. We keep our incidents and service items very separate. Service Items are very specific asks for very specific things. Incidents are issues/problems with things that we categorize at a high level so that users can get a ticket in with the least amount of frustration possible while still allowing us to be able to route effectively via automation. Why would you want them to mirror each other?

hi ​@mskotko, thanks for your insight. 

In our organisation, it’s important to categorise incidents too so that we can analyse occurrences according to system or service. This helps us identify where we need to focus efforts, optimise, invest etc…  In other words, from a certain perspective it doesn’t matter if it’s a specific service request or an incident - if x time was spent on a particular service we need the metrics :)   

​@claytonsaid are you meaning Service Request or actual Service like SAP or Azure that have downtime and need change requests, incidents associated with them, so you know your environment health?  I want to make sure that I’m understanding the ask and that we aren’t using the term “service Item” interchangeably. 

​@ITMike thanks for your response. 

Let me give you an example.

In the Service Catalog we create ‘Categories’ where we place the service items.
e.g. Business Applications [the Category] > Microsoft Word [the Service Item] 

In the Ticket Fields ‘Category’ field we create ‘Business Applications’ as Level-1 category and ‘Microsoft Word’ as Level-2 category.

My analytics reports are built in a way so that for ‘Microsoft Word’ I know how many Service Requests and Incidents were lodged.  It gives me the ability to monitor which application or system is taking up most effort or requires investment/attention. 

I’ve set up a workflow that automatically assigns a Category (main Ticket form field) to a Service Request ticket based on a Custom Object table, to align as in the above example. The categories for Service Requests also helps to assign the ticket to the correct agent group.

My suggestion in this thread is for Freshservice to enable easier association of the categories without having to build custom workflows and objects that are not easy to maintain.