Experiences with new ticketing portal and escalating tickets?

First, I’m just wondering about others’ experiences with using the new ticketing portal.

We’ve had a couple of high priority tickets that haven’t had the same level of attention and action we used to get when submitting issues in the old support portal, and we’re just trying to figure out whether it’s just us or are others experiencing the same. In addition, it often seems the comments we’ve added to a case via the new portal aren’t being received or read, as there is no acknowledgement of those comments. Are other sites experiencing something similar?

Second, has anyone used the escalate function in the new portal and what was the response time to the escalation? How long did you wait until escalating the ticket?

Thanks in advance for responses and insights anyone is willing to share.

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I just had this happen recently. They upgraded our servers overnight and it killed our EDS, so I responded immediately to the upgrade ticket with that information. There was no opportunity to change the priority, so I tried to indicate the urgency in my comment. Crickets. 6 hours later I sent a follow-up comment asking for some acknowledgement. More crickets. Finally about 5pm my time, I used the escalate button. I did not get a response until about 7a.m. the next morning. The message said something to the effect that “iQuest” did not notify us of any comments on this ticket. Only at this point was it sent to their support team, who fortunately had the issue resolved within another 2-3 hours.

When I got the customer satisfaction survey, I related my experience, FWIW.

Lori

The IUG Steering Committee is aware of concerns with the new ticketing system and its after-effects. We have a meeting to discuss with Innovative this week and a session at the IUG Conference 2025 with company officials for the community to get more answers as well.

We’ll let the community know via our newsletter and other communication channels what we hear back from the company.

I would also encourage you to review the lastest preferred escalation procedures from Innovative in this article: Escalating a Case - III - Guest

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@lori.fenton, was this overnight server work the upgrade to the Oracle 8 Red Hat Compatible kernel?

Also, what is EDS?

Bob,

The ticket said it was OEL 8. Not sure if that’s the same as what you’re referring to or not. EDS is EBSCO Discovery Service.

Lori

Sorry, I missed this earlier. Unfortunately, this is true and has been for sometime (before the current ticket system):

I’m not sure if it is a software limitation or a management decision to potentially help reduce interruptions, we’ll see if we can find out more.

“Currently, support staff will only receive a notification when the status of a ticket changes. If you reply to a ticket but the ticket status stays the same, support staff will not get an email notification.”

I’m not sure what happened, but the history of this ticket shows that when I first responded to the ticket, the status changed from Awaiting Customer Confirmation to Reopened. Apparently, their system did not notify anyone of that change in status.

As an infrequent ticketing system user, I guess I just assumed that someone would be notified anytime there was any action/comment/update/status change on an open ticket.

There was a meeting yesterday and we expect to be able to share more information in the coming weeks about improvements already in progress and clarifications on other points and questions.

As to the questions regarding the escalation process within the ticketing app, we have confirmed that is does generate an email to the ticket assignee and their manager.

However, those individuals might be out of the office, it might be outside their normal working hours or they may be unavailable via email for other reasons, so, for the most reliable immediate response 24/7, it is suggested to use the escalation phone number(s).

We’ll share more information in the coming weeks.

Lori and Wes,

Thanks for sharing the information about your experiences and the discussions that are happening to improve the process.

Our first experience with the new portal was in October and it did not go well (it took hours to respond to a report of rapid degradation of service and the system wasn’t restored until two days later). We relayed all of the events in the follow-up survey, including requesting an explanation as to what caused the failure, but did not hear anything in reply.

This most recent instance is a high priority ticket for an ERM function that looks to have not been working correctly since that system failure, and is now preventing us from attaching related holdings to new resource records, among other things. We went over two weeks with no update at all (one of those weeks we were unexpectedly closed as we got a once in a lifetime snowfall), and things finally started moving again but only after we sent an escalation email.

I’m hesitant to escalate tickets as I see that as a last resort, and not a mechanism to get follow-up on tickets. Does their workflow for cases include a step to regularly check on the status and update the customer as to where they are in working on the ticket? This would help in those instances where we’re going days and weeks with no communication, since we don’t have an idea of where they are in the process of investigating and resolving the ticket.

I’m 99% certain that they do have such a mechanism in place. However, sometimes multiple “signals” are needed to help reinforce to others in the organization that there are additional resources or process changes needed. So, I would encourage you to escalate as often as you feel appropriate and call as often as you need to. Also, make sure to fill out the satisfaction surveys when tickets are closed.

Finally, you might also find it help to request a regular check-in with a support person to figure out how you can move forward any issues that seem to be stuck. Others have reported success with monthly check-ins, but you may feel another schedule is appropriate.

We’ll continue to work on “the big picture” items with Innovative, but hopefully these tips will also give you some techniques to improve your local situation in the immediate future while helping provide important feedback on the system as a whole.