Incident – Any event which is not part of the standard operation of a service and which causes, or may cause, an interruption to, or a reduction in the quality of that service.

Although Incident Management by definition is a reactive task, the inbuilt workflow processes within NetSupport ServiceDesk make it a very proactive tool, making it easy for your customers and service desk operators to log, track and manage incidents in such a way that resolution times are kept to a minimum resulting in less downtime of critical systems.

The added advantage of NetSupport ServiceDesk is that it helps you quickly identify recurring issues or trends in the type of incident being logged. Multiple incidents can be linked and if needed assigned to one of the other ITIL processes such as Problem or Change Management, ensuring your first-line operators aren’t duplicating their efforts and enabling investigation of the underlying problem to be left to the appropriate specialist.

Assessing and agreeing the impact, urgency and priority are key to the successful management of incidents. Without this understanding, managing customer expectations and in turn meeting Service Level Agreements becomes difficult. NetSupport ServiceDesk provides both the end user and service team with instantly visible records identifying the operator assigned to deal with the incident, the priority and progress to date. If issues can’t be resolved within the agreed time, NetSupport ServiceDesk makes it easy for the incident to be escalated, either by re-assigning it to a more specialist operator or to a higher authority.

A range of real-time corporate status reports ensure you have accurate, up-to-the–minute stats helping you gauge the effectiveness of your support while you can also help reduce the frequency of reported incidents by educating customers to use NetSupport ServiceDesk’s Solutions Search facility.

	NetSupport ServiceDesk helps the Incident Management process by providing:
	Customers can log incidents on-line and review current status in real time. Automated Incoming/Outgoing email processing. Automatic assignment of incidents to operators based on pre-defined customer rules for either Problem Type or User Type. Automatic escalation of incidents based on customer specific rules. Structured notes history for an incident with source identifiers (telephone, email and more) for each additional entry within the items lifecycle. Full Hardware and Software Inventory information for each user's system. Attach, store and associate files to an incident. Avoid duplicating effort by connecting multiple related incidents. Automatic priority assignment for new incidents. Accurate recording of time spent dealing with incidents. Prioritised Help Requests for users and incident types together with easy operator allocation. Help Request Logging with customisable categories for easy input. Pre-populated Solutions database enables customers to search for an answer before they log an incident.