The aged-ticket review
Filter the service desk by age and look at everything open past 30 days. Some wait on a vendor, some on the client, and a surprising number on nobody at all, parked with an engineer who moved teams or in a status nobody checks.
Each one is a client who stopped chasing, which is worse than a client who is still chasing. They haven't forgotten about it. They've decided this is how long things take with you, and they will remember it at renewal when a competitor asks how responsive you are.
Gather first: an export of tickets older than 30 days, with the last client contact date.
The prompt:
Sort our tickets that have been open more than 30 days by their real cause, and help me stop new ones going stale.
What experienced service desk managers know:
Old tickets rarely sit for one reason. They wait on a vendor, wait on the client, have no real owner or are blocked internally, and each needs a different fix.
"Waiting on client" is often a parked ticket nobody chased. If we have not followed up in the last week, it is our problem.
Clients who stop chasing have not forgotten. They have lowered what they expect from us, and they remember it at renewal.
Tickets open more than 30 days: [client, summary, status, owner, last update, last client contact]
Our SLA targets: [details]
Which engineer covers each client: [details]
Do this:
Group the tickets by real cause, not by status label, and flag any marked "waiting on client" with no follow-up in the last 7 days.
Give every unowned or blocked ticket a named owner and a next step with a date.
Draft a short, honest update for each affected client that gives a date for the next action, not an apology.
Suggest one process change that would stop tickets reaching 30 days unnoticed.
Where a ticket's history is too thin to judge the cause, list it separately for me to check.