Help Desk Software Help Desk General 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the primary purpose of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in help desk operations?
- To define expected response and resolution times for support requests (Correct answer)
- To list all software licenses owned by the company
- To document employee performance reviews
- To outline the budget for IT hardware purchases
Correct answer: To define expected response and resolution times for support requests
An SLA formally defines the expected response and resolution times, quality standards, and responsibilities between the support team and its customers.
Question 2: Which metric measures the percentage of issues resolved on the first contact with the customer?
- Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
- First Call Resolution (FCR) (Correct answer)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Average Handle Time (AHT)
Correct answer: First Call Resolution (FCR)
First Call Resolution (FCR) tracks how often support agents resolve a customer's issue during the very first interaction, without requiring a follow-up.
Question 3: In ITIL terminology, what is the difference between an 'incident' and a 'problem'?
- An incident is planned maintenance; a problem is an unplanned outage
- An incident is an unplanned interruption; a problem is the underlying cause of one or more incidents (Correct answer)
- An incident involves hardware failure; a problem involves software failure
- There is no difference — both terms are interchangeable in ITIL
Correct answer: An incident is an unplanned interruption; a problem is the underlying cause of one or more incidents
ITIL defines an incident as any unplanned interruption to a service, while a problem is the root cause identified behind one or more recurring incidents.
Question 4: A customer submits a ticket but marks it as 'low priority.' The issue is actually causing a complete system outage. What should the help desk agent do?
- Leave the priority as set by the customer to respect their judgment
- Close the ticket and ask the customer to resubmit with the correct priority
- Override the priority based on business impact and escalate immediately (Correct answer)
- Wait for the customer to call back before changing anything
Correct answer: Override the priority based on business impact and escalate immediately
Agents should reassess and override ticket priority when the actual business impact clearly does not match the customer's initial classification, then escalate appropriately.
Question 5: What does 'escalation' mean in the context of a help desk?
- Closing a ticket without resolving it
- Transferring a ticket to a higher tier or specialist when the current agent cannot resolve it (Correct answer)
- Sending an angry reply to a difficult customer
- Automatically marking old tickets as resolved
Correct answer: Transferring a ticket to a higher tier or specialist when the current agent cannot resolve it
Escalation is the process of forwarding an unresolved issue to a higher support tier, subject-matter expert, or management when the current level lacks the skills or authority to resolve it.
Question 6: Which help desk software feature allows agents to send a pre-written response to common questions with a single click?
- Macros or canned responses (Correct answer)
- A CMDB record
- An auto-assign rule
- A change request form
Correct answer: Macros or canned responses
Macros (also called canned responses or templates) let agents insert pre-approved text instantly, improving consistency and reducing handle time for repetitive inquiries.
Question 7: What is 'ticket deflection' in a help desk context?
- Reassigning a ticket to avoid working on it
- Preventing tickets from being created by helping users self-serve through a knowledge base or chatbot (Correct answer)
- Deleting spam tickets from the queue
- Merging duplicate tickets into one
Correct answer: Preventing tickets from being created by helping users self-serve through a knowledge base or chatbot
Ticket deflection refers to strategies—such as self-service portals, FAQs, and AI chatbots—that empower users to resolve issues on their own, reducing overall ticket volume.
Help Desk Software Help Desk General 2
What is the primary purpose of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in help desk operations?