The Difference Between an Incident and a Service Request
When raising a ticket, it may not be clear whether the matter an Incident or a Service Request. This guide will provide clarification on the characteristics of each type of ticket, and explain the benefits of raising the correct type of ticket.
What is an Incident?
An incident is any unplanned interruption or reduction of quality in your access to an IT service. Effectively, this is where something has stopped working as it should and must be fixed to restore normal functionality. You can raise an incident here.
Examples of an Incident
- Unable to send/receive emails
- A printer is broken
- An application (Outlook, Visual Files etc.) has crashed
What is a Service Request
A service request is where you need access to a service or piece of equipment (such as a shared mailbox, or a headset), and the request has not been prompted by something being broken or malfunctioning. In Fresh, there are a wide variety of templates for common requests which can be found here.
Using the correct template can help dramatically with how efficiently your request is processed. The reason for this is that, wherever possible, Service Request templates include their own automation workflows that ensure that things like approval requests are sent to the right person as soon as the ticket is raised and that the ticket gets sent to the correct team immediately. This means that any predetermined steps in the process don't need to wait for manual review before the ticket can progress.
Examples of a Service Request