When your helpdesk starts to feel crowded, even the smallest inefficiencies add up. Whether your team is experiencing ticket fatigue or you’re just looking to clean up workflows, there are a few practical, field-tested ways to make your helpdesk more organized, measurable, and proactive using Syncro.

Let's take a look at how one MSP who oversees a team of 20 Technicians streamlines ticket management using Ticket Tags, Ticket Views, and Ticket Automations. They handle 400 to 500 tickets daily, many of which are automatically created from alerts.

Build a Solid Foundation with Ticket Tags

Recall that Ticket Tags can be anything you want. They're designed to facilitate the organization and segmentation of tickets in a way that aligns with your business.

To organize, monitor, and automate helpdesk processes, you'll want to make good use of Ticket Tags. Some examples from this MSP include:

• alert: for tickets created from alerts. Some are more discrete, by type (e.g., seimalert).
• helpdesk: used to track all the different operations across his business that have tickets. 
• NOC work: for tickets needing attention from his NOC team. Other team-based tags could include finance, security,  or backups.
• office: tag for tickets that track internal work. For example, action items from a meeting, HR-related tasks, and even performance reviews. 
• projects: for tickets related to larger projects. These are often parent tickets, but they don't have to be. Some are more specific (e.g., Project-PEN).
• systems: for tickets his systems engineering team handles. Some are in combination (e.g., project-systems). 

Tips: 

• If you don't see the Ticket Tags column in the table, click the gear () icon in the upper right then check the Ticket Tags box.
• Use the Filter to only show the Tickets you want to tag right now.
• See Work with Ticket Tags for additional information.

Create Focused Ticket Views

Now you'll start putting those Ticket Tags to work for you, just like this MSP. The first way he uses each of his Ticket Tags is in Pinned Ticket Views. 

His Ticket Views (in the left panel) have names that are similar to the Ticket Tags in the column:

• Alerts Board: Displays tickets that are automatically created from an RMM alert.
• Helpdesk: This is his default, high-level view of everything that's going on in his business. There's another variation of this view (Helpdesk By Client), which is useful when he's on the phone with a person from that Organization; he can see exactly what they currently have open.
• NOC/Systems: Corresponds to the tickets tagged NOC work or systems so he can quickly whether either of these team are overwhelmed.
• Office: These views show only the tickets with tags containing the words office. 
• SIEM Alerts - Daily: Consolidates tickets created from third-party security monitoring apps so all SIEM alerts can be triaged together.
• Assigned to [TechName] - Open: Created so each of his Techs can begin their day by checking only the tickets relevant to them. These views also help him reassign tickets if any one person is overloaded or out of the office.

Tip: If you have service offerings where you perform work for clients on a regular basis---for example, if you perform a quarterly penetration test for clients with cybersecurity insurance and create an action plan that you review with them---you can automatically add these projects to a view by adding a Project-PEN tag to Recurring Tickets.

Track Performance with Ticket View Health Metrics

With this structure in place, our example MSP (and now you) can click on any Pinned Ticket View on the left to get a better sense of any bottlenecks or high risk areas. 

The Ticket View Metrics Panel at the top of every Ticket View highlights important data such as how many tickets are unresolved or about to breach their SLA:

These metrics help you make data-informed improvements before problems escalate. 

You can customize the thresholds for each Ticket View so anything concerning will leap out in red. See Use Ticket View Metrics for detailed instructions.

Use Ticket Automations to Transition Tickets to Different Teams

The next layer of efficiency comes from Ticket Automation. 

Our example MSP uses Ticket Automations to insert standardized communications, to reset SLAs, and transfer tickets among teams. This ensures every client receives consistent, professional communication. Let's look more closely at how he does this. 

Recall that the automation type for a Ticket Automation can be Hourly (as shown below), or if you're on the Team plan, you can use the Ticket Status Changed automation type to kick off an automation without delay:

In this example, when a triaging helpdesk Technician decides a ticket needs to be reviewed by the systems team, he'll update the Ticket's Status to a custom status named “Move to Engineer.” 

Then this automation will:

• Set the SLA, 
• Add the systems Ticket Tag so it appears in the appropriate Pinned Ticket View, and 
• Add a Public Note/Comment about the transition in the Ticket.

Tips: 

• You could also add a “Ticket Subject" Condition with a “contains” operator to screen for particular tickets. For example, maybe the subject also needs to have “network” in it for this automation to run.
• You can also push alerts with standard Subject lines to a view like the “Alerts Board” mentioned above using a Ticket Automation. For Tickets with a Status = New, the Subject contains something like “Microsoft 365” or “Defender for Cloud Apps," for example.
• See Work with Ticket Automations for detailed instructions.