Must-have automations to promote consistency, correct ticket lifecycle management, and allow agents to focus on the tasks that actually matter.
Because every organisation has unique policies, levels of maturity, and objectives, most ITSM platforms are designed so that automations can be built and tailored from the ground up.
In their simplest form, these automations are generally made up of three core components: Trigger, Conditions & Actions.
What will cause the automation to act. These may be scheduled, or based on a field value change.
Criteria to be checked and confirmed before the automation enacts changes.
The tasks undertaken by the automation once all conditions are met.
During discovery, we often find that while clients have SLAs defined in their ITSM platform, they are rarely tracked, reported on, or leveraged to drive service improvement.
A quick win is to introduce automations that notify assignees or team leads when SLAs are breached—or approaching breach. For higher-priority tickets, it can also be effective to automatically escalate these to a team lead or manager, ensuring timely action and improved service quality.
TRIGGER: SLA (Resolution and/or Response) is Breached
CONDITION: Ticket NOT IN (P5)
ACTION: EMAIL assignee AND team leader AND color ticket (in list) red
Another common problem we see when onboarding new clients are tickets that have been lost, forgotten about or never correctly closed. This can skew report metrics including SLA’s & ticket volumes, as well as add additional noise to your ITSM platform.
We suggest creating an automation rule to handle aging tickets, as well as ensure transparency using a dashboard or scheduled report.
TRIGGER: Scheduled Weekly on Monday
CONDITION: Ticket status UNCHANGED for 5d
ACTION: EMAIL team lead list of tickets AND FOR EACH ticket, EMAIL assignee
We often see organisations have adopted scheduled CAB meetings; however the agenda is not clear, and tickets are not properly submitted. We also often see Problem tickets being created, but quickly forgotten about.
We recommend using an automation to list all upcoming changes, if and only if all require fields are complete. We also suggest changes contain a ‘Change Risk Score’ so that high-risk changes can be identified and ensuring active problem tickets are discussed by leadership frequently.
TRIGGER: Scheduled Weekly on Monday
CONDITION: Ticket status IN (Change authorisation, active problem)
ACTION: EMAIL change manager list of tickets AND FOR EACH problem ticket, EMAIL change owner for update
One of the most effective methods to ensure tickets progress smoothly is to notify end-users that tickets are waiting on them, and if they fail to acknowledge, auto-resolving the ticket. At the point the ticket is auto-resolved, users have an additional opportunity to re-open the ticket.
This greatly reduces stale tickets, and forgotten about tickets for issues that have already been resolved.
TRIGGER: Ticket Status IN (With USER) for 16 business hours
CONDITION: Ticket status IN (With User)
ACTION: Notify ticket reporter. Repeat 3 times AND THEN change STATUS to RESOLVED
Almost every organisation has a set of users who agents naturally (or by protocol) will treat differently. This may be leadership, vendors, or external contractors. To ensure tickets raise by your subset of VIP users are readily identifiable, we recommend using automations to change their properties e.g. colour, priority or assignee.
TRIGGER: New ticket raised
CONDITION: Ticket reporter IN group(VIP USER)
ACTION: Set ticket color RED AND upgrade priority
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