What is an effective incident management system? Taking action to restore normal service operation quickly while minimizing negative impact on business operations. Managing incidents effectively is an essential piece for providing quality customer support. This can also help teams improve their current operations to prevent future incidents.
Benefits of an effective incident management system:
- Increased productivity and efficiency
- Higher level of service quality
- Visibility and transparency
- Valuable IT service management documentation
- Enhance end user satisfaction
The self-service portal is the single point of contact for the users to report any incidents. IT responds, handles, and resolves any request or issue to the business and/or customers depending upon what both parties think about impact and urgency. Then the incident is designated to staff that can best resolve it.
There are 3 major factors through which an incident order is decided upon: Impact, urgency, and priority.
Impact – How a business is affected by an incident?
Urgent – How urgent the incident is and how much time it will take to be resolved?
Priority – What is the priority of the incident ? (Low, Medium or High)
5 steps of incident management:
- Incident Reporting communication begins at the time an incident is identified to acknowledge to the user or business that a disruption is taking place and investigation is in progress.
- Incident Escalation occurs when an incident triggers an alert and the proper procedures are performed by the individual who is assigned to manage the incident.
- Investigation and Diagnosis IT team performs analysis, then staff can begin investigating the type, cause, and possible solutions for an incident.
- Resolution and Recovery involve eliminating root causes of issues and restoring systems to full functioning. Resolving an incident also includes documenting analysis findings and steps taken to restore service.
- Incident Closure communicating and confirming from users that the service experience is normalized ensuring customer satisfaction is met.