IT Service Desk · training guide · draft

How to triage and route incoming tickets

Make sure every new ticket gets a category, a priority and an assignment group, so it leaves the unassigned queue and reaches the right team.

Typical time: about 3 min · Use this whenever a new ticket from email or the portal appears in the unassigned queue.

Steps

1. 1
   Open the next new ticket from the unassigned queue. · ServiceNow

   Reading the ticket is where most of the roughly 3 minutes goes. Look for missing information now, since it causes most rework.
2. 2
   Read the description and note impact, urgency, and whether it is an outage. · ServiceNow
3. 3
   Set the Category from what the requester describes. · ServiceNow

   Software and Network follow the same description-based approach. The team gave examples only for Access and Hardware.
4. 4
   Set the Priority using the impact and urgency matrix. · ServiceNow

   Most tickets end up Moderate (about 60%) or Low (about 29%). Only about 10% are High.
5. 5
   Set the Assignment group that matches the category. · ServiceNow

   Security incidents skip the unassigned queue and go straight to the security team. They are rare.
6. 6
   For a P1, phone the on-call engineer as well as assigning. · Phone

   Assigning the ticket is not enough for a P1.
7. 7
   Check that category, priority and group are set and the ticket has left the queue. · ServiceNow

Watch out for

• Assignment group is the field most often changed again. About 11% of tickets have a field re-edited, so check the category, VIP and security status before choosing.
• About 7% of tickets pause after assignment, for a median of about 1.1 hours, and the steps are then redone. Everyone links this to missing information in the ticket.
• A VIP ticket sent to the group the category would give is misrouted. VIP tickets go to the senior desk, and this rule was not applied consistently in the answers.
• A P1 that is only assigned and not phoned in may not reach the on-call engineer in time.

Faster ways

• A Copilot Studio agent with Power Automate could prepare category, priority and group from the ticket description, using the existing routing rules. Estimated time saved is 35–55%.
• Keep an analyst approving the prepared values in one step, because policy doesn't allow unattended changes. Unclear or low-confidence tickets would go to an analyst queue.

Written by AI from how the team actually did this work (2026-10-19 to 2026-10-23): the most common path, the steps people add or redo, and where errors happen. Review and edit before sharing.