IT Service Desk · training guide · draft

How to handle: Triage and route incoming tickets

Complete triage and route incoming tickets correctly and on time.

Typical time: about 3 min · New tickets in the unassigned queue, from email and the portal.

Steps

1. 1
   Open Incident · ServiceNow
2. 2
   Fill in Category · ServiceNow

   Decide: From what the user describes: can't log in is Access, laptop issues are Hardware.
3. 3
   Fill in Priority · ServiceNow

   Decide: Impact and urgency matrix; outages are P1.
4. 4
   Fill in Assignment group · ServiceNow

   Decide: By category: Hardware to Desktop Support, Network to Network Ops, apps to App Support.

Watch out for

• Unusual case: Security incidents skip the queue and go straight to the security team.
• 6% of cases get picked up again later and redone.
• 7% of cases wait about 1.1 hours.

Faster ways

• AI drafts category, priority and assignment for each new ticket; analyst confirms.

Written by AI from how the team actually did this work (2026-10-19 to 2026-10-24): the most common path, the steps people add or redo, and where errors happen. Review and edit before sharing.