What Do Goals and Service Tickets Have in Common?
The new football season is just around the corner. These days, more time is often spent analyzing the game and its players than watching the matches themselves. Coaches and support staff increasingly rely on data to improve performance and prevent mistakes.
Take a conceded goal, for example. It might seem like a defensive error, but a closer look often reveals that things went wrong two minutes earlier – perhaps when the striker lost the ball, causing the defenders to fall out of position and miss their mark.
Process Mining: Understanding the Game Before Improving It
At Joost-IT, we do something similar – but in the world of Service Management. Instead of analyzing football matches, we examine how service tickets move through your organization. And we’re increasingly using process mining to do that.
Process mining is a powerful method that uses algorithms to analyze event log data. It allows us to quickly and clearly identify trends, bottlenecks, and process deviations – insights that can drive targeted improvements.
We apply process mining, for instance, as part of our TOPdesk and Xurrent Healthcheck services. These tools give you a fast and focused view of whether your organization is, as we like to say, service-fit.
From Lost Balls to Lost Tickets
To assess that, we automatically extract all available data from your Service Management systems. Then we run focused analyses that show how your processes actually run – not just how they’re supposed to.
Here are a few common patterns we often uncover:
Skipped steps: Out of ten defined process steps, 90% of tickets jump straight from step 1 to step 8.
Dead ends: Tickets are assigned to a team that doesn’t take further action.
Ticket ping-pong: Tickets are bounced around the organization multiple times before anything gets done.
In Control Through Insight
With process mining, these patterns become visible surprisingly quickly. Since the data is already being collected automatically, you can identify unwanted behaviors and understand their root causes. That enables you to take precise, targeted actions – leading to overall process improvement.
There’s another bonus: organizations that use process mining also benefit during audits – whether internal or external. Traditionally, auditors request a sample of ten random service requests to verify whether they were handled according to documented procedures.
With process mining, you don’t need to scramble for samples. You can instantly show what percentage of your processes are compliant and what isn’t – all at the push of a button. This saves time and shows auditors that you’re in control, with ongoing visibility into your service processes. In this way, process mining also becomes a powerful tool to demonstrate compliance.
Scoring Through Improvement
The vast amount of available data offers huge potential for improving your operations. We’ve developed standard models that help us answer our clients’ most common questions quickly and effectively.
What truly makes the difference is this: process mining doesn’t just focus on the resolution of a service ticket – it looks at the entire process around it. It reveals patterns, relationships, and root causes – and, therefore, the way to solve them.
Good Service Management is like good defending: you prevent issues before they turn into goals. And that gives you the opportunity to take control and score yourself.