Powerful Time-Based Automation Rules to Move You From Reactive to Proactive

Bad things left alone tend to get worse Unattended incidents won’t clean up after themselves and will come back to haunt you—whether as rising MTTR metrics, a cluttered Incident Index, fruitless back-and-forth communication, or a declining CSAT score.

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” – Bill Gates Source

Powerful automation conditions can drive productivity, save you manual work, and speed up your incident lifecycle management—and keep your employees happy. Before I show you how this can be done with time-based automation conditions, let's talk about what these are and how they differ from regular automation conditions. Advanced service desk automation rules allow you use date/time fields when setting up rules in a predefined range of time relevant to a record’s update, such as sending an automatic notification to a requester who hasn’t answered a technician's question for two days. Or automatically changing the priority or risk fields of an incident of a Tier 1 category that hasn’t been updated for three days. Another good example can be sending a notification to the relevant assignee—when a ticket is created outside of business hours, so they can give it priority as they start their shift. Instead of having the help desk manager or requester asking about delays, the system helps the technician be proactive, and properly include this ticket into his shift’s prioritization. Another helpful capability is the option to include date/time fields in regular automation conditions, which can also allow you to take proactive measures, ahead of time, like sending a notification about all incidents due this week. Timing is everything! The real fun begins when you set automation rules to execute automated actions before a condition is met or after a record’s update in exact time intervals. When is this useful? Setting up automated time-based notifications to keep things from falling between the cracks is a good example. You can also end a notification to an assignee when a ticket is past due date. Or send a notification to IT management on tickets that haven’t been updated in three days.  Remember to check and test your rules Don’t forget to double-check and test your automations rules, so you don’t fall into the statistics of Bill Gates’ second rule: “automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” How can you easily avoid this? Go over the rules and actions several time to make sure some of the later ones don’t conflict or override the first ones (and if they do override them, at least it’s by design). Another way to ensure your rule is configured properly in a way that makes sense is to quickly test it with a mock record you can delete later. For information on how to set up your service desk automation alignment in seven simple steps, check out this on-demand webcast.