White boarding with your help desk team can help sketch out a basic framework of categories and their hierarchical relationships. But if you then involve senior management and other stakeholders, you’ll be able to learn the types of reporting, key performance indicators, and other metrics they may want to access from the new system. Categories play a major role in reporting, making it important to link the two early in the design process.
This is a good opportunity to reach out to other departments such as HR, Facilities, and Customer Service. Your same team and infrastructure that supports hardware and software could also be used to create tickets for Facilities to deliver a phone to a new hire or to coordinate an office move.
Finally, involve your internal customers – the users. Integrating the user’s perspective is always important—and particularly so if you plan to deploy a portal with branching questions or a knowledge base to guide self-help options.
See iSupport’s whitepaper Defining and Organizing Category Structures to learn more about involving others in the category creation process.
