The Future is Zero Ticket

When organising the replacement of my work laptop last week, I tried to think about the best an easiest way for me to do it. Who do I call? Do I email the Service Desk? Do I speak to Harold (our Virtual Agent)? Do I just buy my own and use it as a registered device…Then, a thought tickled my brain: If I had just started in an organisation without any experience or preconceived notions, what would be the fastest, most intuitive way for me to reach productivity? Zero Ticket! 

Ideally, before I even start day one, I want my mobile phone and laptop to turn up at my (and not my neighbours') door, fully set up, simply add MFA and biometric logins, and live in a passwordless world—one less thing to have to remember! 

But what if anything goes wrong in the process? 

It just should not. If anything is heading in the wrong direction, it is the company’s responsibility to monitor, notice, correct, and prevent it from happening to anyone else. At the end of the day, as an employee, I want things “just to work”, as any delays or frustrations are impacting my productivity. I don’t even want to raise a ticket, as that activity takes further time away from delivering on my project or KPIs.  

The future is Zero Ticket. It needs to be if we are serious about people’s wellbeing, productivity, and talent retention. 

As the Service Management industry has shifted left from in-person support only, to phone, to email, to service portals, and to chat bots, it has delivered only marginal gains in solving basic end-user challenges when anything goes wrong with their technology (e.g. your emails are not coming through on a busy day): 

• Trying to identify what is wrong (spending your own productive time) 

• Deciding if you can solve it yourself (test connectivity, restart application, laptop, play about with configuration) or need help  

• Finding out who to contact (IT) 

• Finding out how to contact them (What is that web address to the portal that keeps changing? Is it on the intranet? Is it on Teams? Why do we have to have “special” names for everything? Why can I not see any phone number anywhere?) 

• Identify the most efficient channel to get fast and convenient service (I cannot call right now as I am in meetings and email might take ages to get spotted) 

• Having to report the issue (waste of my productive time!) 

• Waiting for an unknown time to get a response (and getting no emails in the meantime) 

• Being pulled from one agent to another (I don’t care if it’s an Azure issue, I just want my email to work!) 

• Having to explain yourself over and over again (this is frustrating!) 

• Having to provide details IT should know already (you should already know the type of my phone and laptop) 

• Email about ticket closed? Let ME check… 

• Of course not, now you have to go into the back of the queue and repeat the process (I have deadlines to hit! Why is this company so incompetent?! My life is too short for this!) 

What should have happened instead? 

• 9:00 - A DEX monitoring tool has spotted multiple end-users are struggling to log in and they keep restarting their Outlook applications and laptops 

• 9:01 – The Observability tool has identified multiple unusual events across the infrastructure 

• 9:02 - The AIOps tool has clustered hundreds of these events into a single ticket, assigned an appropriate priority based on impact and urgency 

• 9:03 – An agent has picked up the ticket and the AIOps technology has provided them with an incident summary and multiple suggestions of actions they can take, and a button to take them 

• 9:04 – An agent has verified an AI-generated message and sent it out to inform the affected employees about the issue (through Virtual Agent on Teams) 

• 9:07 – The third action suggested seemed to have worked (reverting a Change)  

• 9:10 - The agent was able to contact some of the affected end-users to confirm they are no longer experiencing any issues 

• 9:12 – An agent sent an AI-generated ticket closed message and requested feedback. Those end-users who provided feedback (that took less than 30 seconds to fill out) get a thank you and a short message about what other users have previously reported, how the IT team handled it, and what the impact of improvements was on the end-users, showcasing the positive impact their feedback has 

• 9:15 - The agent is reviewing the automatic workflow suggested by the AI and sending it for approval to be used in the future as an automated fix, saving further agent and end-user productivity time. This removes the need for anyone to raise a ticket next time, making the Zero Ticket reality. 

• At the end of each week, time saved is calculated, and the business stakeholders can query any and all of the IT performance data via an NLU-powered Virtual Assistant/Copilot. 

What you see above is not some dystopian sci-fi. Market-leading enterprises already do this, and the technology will only get smarter.  

The beauty of switching from reactive to proactive and then to predictive is that the users did not have to waste productive time reporting the issue. They may not have even spotted their emails not working for the next hour or two, and the technology in the background enables them to focus on their own role rather than expensing their energy in frustration. 

Where do I start? You may ask. 

The businessman in me wants to say: Speak to us! However, ultimately, there are three key pieces to the answer (and yes, ITIL-inspired!): 

• Understand exactly where you are (people, process, technology) 

• Understand where you want to be (people, process, technology) 

• Draw up a rough multi-year timeline of how to get there: 

• Focus on value to the business (ROI) 

• Progress iteratively (PoC, MVP) 

• Think holistically (End-to-end impact of changes) 

• Hyperautomate 

• Communicate in a simple, practical way, encouraging and actioning feedback 

• Encourage the creation of CoE’s and accountability for results 

The world is galloping towards the Zero Ticket future. Are you ready to jump into the saddle?