Reducing IT service desk resolution times
A growing SaaS company rebuilt its service desk around a structured catalog and triage model, cutting resolution times and shifting capacity to proactive work.
SaaS company, 900 employees · 900 employees, 40-person IT team
The challenge
The IT team had outgrown its informal intake: requests arrived by chat, email, hallway conversation, and a ticketing tool nobody trusted. Prioritization depended on who asked loudest, and resolution times had drifted upward as the company grew.
Roughly half of incoming volume was repetitive, password resets, access requests, and status questions, crowding out the project work the team was hired to do.
The solution
The team consolidated all intake into Auliq's IT service management application and published an honest service catalog: what is offered, through which channel, and with what response target. Triage rules route requests by category, and self-service covers the highest-volume items.
A short monthly review examines recurring incident patterns, reopen rates, and backlog age, producing one improvement action with an owner each cycle.
The implementation
The rollout began with the catalog itself: the team audited three months of requests, grouped them, and wrote definitions users could actually recognize. The catalog launched before the tooling, so intake channels pointed at real categories from day one.
Self-service items were added incrementally, starting with the top five request types. The team communicated the change through the channels it was retiring, so users learned the new path at the moment the old one closed.
The results
Average resolution time fell from 3.2 days to 1.4, and first-contact resolution rose to 72 percent as triage sent requests to the right team the first time. Self-service removed roughly a third of the ticket volume the desk previously handled.
The IT team redirected the recovered capacity to onboarding automation and infrastructure work, and the monthly improvement review has since produced changes upstream, fixing the causes of recurring incidents rather than the symptoms.
"The catalog changed everything. Once we agreed what we offer and how fast, the queue stopped being a negotiation."
Head of IT