Incident management software benefits and feature checklist

With a proper ITIL incident management process in place, you can:

• Record all reported IT incidents in a central repository.
• Automatically categorize and classify IT incidents based on parameters like priority, urgency, impact, and department.
• Associate the appropriate SLAs with IT incident tickets.
• Assign tickets to technicians or support groups for investigation.
• Identify resolutions and workarounds to incidents.
• Document resolutions in a knowledge base for future reference.
• Create live dashboards and reports from help desk data for insights and analysis for effective handling of incidents.

When choosing a ticketing system or IT help desk software, there are a few features that can make or break your IT incident management. Here are some features to consider when choosing incident management software:

• A central repository to log and track issues.
• Automatic generation of incidents from email, chat, SMS, and more.
• Automatic ticket routing, categorization, incident closure, and more.
• Automatic incident prioritization based on impact and urgency.
• Email and SMS communication from within the application.
• Both customizable and predefined forms and templates.
• A priority matrix that helps define the priority of tickets based on their impact and urgency.
• Custom scripts for integrating with external applications.
• The option to create multiple tasks for each incident.
• Configurable rules to automatically drive tasks and route incidents.
• Well-established response and resolution SLA management.
• The option to pause the SLA timer for a specific period of time.
• Ability to link incidents to other modules including problems and changes.
• The option to associate incidents with related problems or convert an incident to a problem or a change.
• A self-service portal where users can log their tickets.
• Live chat included within the help desk.
• A calendar showing technician availability.
• A complete history of incidents and workstations.
• Customizable roles and incident templates.
• Task management for IT incidents.
• Ability to create multiple sites.
• A customizable knowledge base that allows end users to search for possible resolutions.
• Notifications for users and technicians.
• Automated user satisfaction surveys that collect feedback from end users.
• Support for integration with other IT management tools and applications.