Our approach to ticketing and automation

In this series, you’ll hear directly from Vanta’s own Security, Enterprise Engineering, and Privacy, Risk, and Compliance Teams to learn about the team’s approach to keeping Vanta secure. We’ll also share some guidance for teams of all sizes — whether you’re just getting started or looking to uplevel your operations. 

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In this post, you’ll hear from Janiece Caldwell, Senior Operations Engineer on our Enterprise Engineering team, and Jess Chang, Staff Technical Program Manager, who led our approach to building the foundation for our ticketing system at Vanta.

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What’s a ticketing system?

A ticketing system is software that teams use to intake, triage, route, and respond to customers—in this case, we’re referring to internal customers within a company, including employees and contractors.

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At Vanta, our Enterprise Engineering team helped establish our company-wide ticketing system to help uplevel how internal requests are handled as part of improving how employees work every day. 

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Why ticketing and automation?

Many companies typically start by intaking requests in standard channels such as email and Slack, which is what we used to do at Vanta as well. While email and Slack are familiar channels, they have drawbacks for both requesters and responding teams, including:

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For the requester:

• Lack of visibility on the status of the request, which can be challenging and frustrating especially for time-sensitive requests.
• Manual searching to review updates for a request (e.g. through an email inbox or Slack).
• Inability to prioritize multiple issues effectively without a ticketing system.

For agents and responding teams:

• Manual tracking of requests that come in from multiple channels.
• Manual responses from agents for different types of requests.
• Managing conversations that happen in multiple channels to intake, request approval(s) needed, and complete a request.
• Lack of ability to view metrics on requests (e.g. type, volume, SLA).
• Difficult to properly prioritize tickets.

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While our Enterprise Engineering team was in its early stages of formation at Vanta, the need to establish a ticketing system quickly became apparent. In fact, it was at the top of our request list from internal stakeholders. But why? 

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At a high level, using a ticketing system helps our team centralize all requests we receive and holds us accountable as a support team. Other benefits include:

• Defined workflows and automation for different types of request types, reducing manual work needed to loop in different approvers while also documenting approvals in one spot.
• Ability for requester to follow progress of tickets and requests via an end-user portal.
• Clear visibility, centralization, and organization for all request types for our team.
• Ability to capture and report on clear metrics for all activity and requests, including ticket volume, tickets by issue type, top requests, average first response time, average resolution time, and more.

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What are some steps to consider when moving to a ticketing system?

As many ticketing platforms exist, it’s important to consider your requirements up front, including defining features that are critical vs. nice to have for your team and business. While it’s typical to optimize for cost and user experience, we found that all platforms we looked at had a thoughtful end-user experience and platform; however, cost tended to vary more across platforms.

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One thing that was important to our team at Vanta was the ability to separate the intake, routing, and triage of any tickets with potentially sensitive information, such as tickets for your HR team, to ensure that admins and agents for other portions of your helpdesk portal don’t have access. 

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Another important consideration for our team was the depth of offerings from a ticketing system, such as automation, a knowledge base, and a service catalog of predetermined services provided. For instance, an internal-facing service catalog allows you to anticipate the potential needs of your employees with a wide range of custom forms and flows for requests such as:

• Access to software licenses
• New hardware or loaner devices
• Review or publishing of content
• Procurement of new software
• Exceptions to specific policies or standards

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If you’re wondering where we ended up, our team at Vanta ultimately chose Freshservice as our internal ticketing system for its depth of offerings — and we continue to be happy with our choice!

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How does the Enterprise Engineering team approach metrics?

As an Enterprise Engineering team, the ability to aggregate and report upon different metrics drawn from our ticketing platform has allowed us to look ahead and make informed decisions based on usage. Instead of relying on a rough sense of recent requests, deeper analytics have helped our team:

• Project volume to ensure our team is well-resourced and adapts to support the business.
• Aggregate issues to better understand the big picture and investigate root cause, instead of viewing individual incidents as isolated events.
• Make provisioning changes where needed to reduce manual, unnecessary requests.
• Invest additional resources where needed.

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For instance, as a team that’s responsible for provisioning software, if we receive a high volume of requests for the same tool from the same team, we can make changes to automatically grant access upon onboarding to eliminate the need for new employees to place manual requests.

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How have automations helped uplevel your work?

Even at a small company like Vanta, it can be complex to loop in the right information and approvers at the right time — let alone in one spot! Setting up automation for complex workflows has helped our team streamline and capture approval workflows, including documentation of approvals, and grant automated access once fully approved.

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Not only does this eliminate manual work and side conversations (e.g. in Slack or email), but this also reduces chances of error and allows our team to be more productive with automated routing and preset responses.

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What other features have been helpful?

While each company varies, we’ve found value in creating an internal knowledge base with articles, guidance, and resources for our employees to allow them to self-service any questions or issues they may run into. As a bonus, lightweight analytics, tagging, and keywords on articles allow us to continue to iterate to make these more useful over time.

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We also use a Slackbot at Vanta that surfaces articles and Service Catalog items directly from our knowledge base. This helps our employees get help more quickly and, where possible, resolve issues on their own.

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Do you have any tips on how to implement a ticketing system?

Yes! While ticketing systems are often associated with IT help desks and teams, remember that many teams intake questions, requests, and other items from employees — such as your legal, marketing, HR, and workplace/office teams. 

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At Vanta, we worked to get buy-in across the company by meeting with each team and demonstrating the value of moving to a ticketing system from Slack and email intake. Thankfully this wasn’t a difficult case to make, and we worked with teams to plug in their tools, workflows, and automations in a systematic way.

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For team members who would interface with the ticketing platform as “agents,” we worked to help set them up for success by:

• Creating an intake form for any automation and new workflows needed.
• Establishing a dedicated agents-only Slack channel for any agent questions to foster collaboration and cross-functional problem solving.
• Setting up bi-weekly office hours for 1:1 questions.
• Creating a training guide and hosting in-person trainings for new agents on an as-needed basis to familiarize them with the platform.

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While every company has unique needs, it’s important to remember that new tooling and workflows will take time to learn before they become part of the company’s standard way of working. Overall, implementing and embracing an internal ticketing system has transformed and upleveled the way our Enterprise Engineering team (and others!) work at Vanta, and we hope our insights can help your team as well.

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