Autotask: a pragmatic ticketing workflow (triage, SLA, escalation, closure)

Goal

Standardize incident and request handling in Autotask:

• Creation/triage (email → ticket)
• Qualification (impact, urgency, category)
• SLA compliance (priorities, escalation)
• Traceability (notes, attachments, time entries)
• Clean closure (resolution, customer comms, lightweight post-mortem)

Step 1 — Intake: from email to ticket

1. Open Autotask.
2. Go to Service Desk → Tickets.
3. Filter by queue: N1 - Support (or equivalent).
4. Confirm the email created a ticket:
   • Email subject → ticket title
   • Email body → description / initial note
   • Attachments → Attachments tab

Good practices

• One support mailbox: support@...
• Clear subject pattern: [Customer] - [Service] - [Symptom]
• Ensure Company / Contact mapping is correct.

Step 2 — Qualification (≤ 3 minutes)

Open the ticket and fill:

1. Company / Contact
2. Type: Incident / Service Request / Problem
3. Category / Subcategory
4. Impact
5. Urgency
6. Priority
7. Source (Email, Phone, Monitoring, etc.)

Simple Impact × Urgency matrix (example)

• High impact + High urgency → P1
• High impact + Medium urgency → P2
• Medium impact + High urgency → P2
• Medium impact + Medium urgency → P3
• Everything else → P4

Step 3 — SLA: timers and escalation

1. Check which SLA is applied (often automatic by Company).
2. Confirm Due Date and/or milestones (First Response / Resolution).
3. For P1/P2:
   • Assign a technician immediately
   • Add “On-call” tag/flag if you use one
   • Notify internal channel per your runbook

Step 4 — Work log: notes + time entries

4.1 Notes (communication)

• Internal note: for the team (diagnosis, hypotheses, next steps)
• Customer note: clear, factual, minimal jargon

Recommended structure

• Symptom:
• Findings:
• Actions taken:
• Result:
• Next step:

4.2 Time Entry (mandatory)

1. Click New Time Entry.
2. Fill:
   • Date / Start / End
   • Work Type (Remote/On-site)
   • Summary Notes (actionable)
3. Save.

Step 5 — Escalation to N2 / vendor

When to escalate

• Scope is beyond N1
• You collected evidence (logs/screenshots)
• You ran standard N1 actions (runbook)

Escalation pack (put into the ticket)

• Context: customer, site, impact
• Timestamp + frequency
• Evidence: logs/screenshots
• Actions already tried (+ outcome)
• Hypothesis + a specific question

Then:

1. Change Assigned Resource to N2 (or dedicated queue).
2. Add an internal note “ESCALATION” with the pack.
3. If vendor case is needed, add the case ID in the ticket.

Step 6 — Closure quality

Before closing:

1. Ensure the Resolution field is filled.
2. Ensure customer communication is logged/sent.
3. Confirm:
   • at least one time entry
   • relevant attachments
4. Set status to Complete / Closed.

Step 7 — Lightweight post-mortem (P1/P2)

Add an internal “RETEX” note:

• Root cause (if known)
• Corrective action
• Preventive action (monitoring, policy, documentation)
• Follow-up task if needed