Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718

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Journal of King Saud University –

Computer and Information Sciences
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A machine learning based help desk system for IT service management

Feras Al-Hawari a,⇑, Hala Barham b
a
Computer Engineering Department, German Jordanian University, Amman, Jordan
b
Information Systems and Technology Center, German Jordanian University, Amman, Jordan

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A help desk system that acts as a single point of contact between users and IT staff is introduced in this
Received 10 January 2019 paper. It utilizes an accurate ticket classification machine learning model to associate a help desk ticket
Revised 12 March 2019 with its correct service from the start and hence minimize ticket resolution time, save human resources,
Accepted 1 April 2019
and enhance user satisfaction. The model is generated according to an empirically developed methodol-
Available online 2 April 2019
ogy that is comprised of the following steps: training tickets generation, ticket data preprocessing, words
stemming, feature vectorization, and machine learning algorithm tuning. Nevertheless, the experimental
Keywords:
results showed that including the ticket comments and description in the training data was one of the
Machine learning
Text classification
main factors that enhanced the model prediction accuracy from 53.8% to 81.4%. Furthermore, the system
Help desk system supports an administrator view that facilitates defining offered services, administering user roles, manag-
Software engineering ing tickets and generating management reports. Also, it offers a user view that allows employees to report
IT service management (ITSM) issues, request services, and exchange information with the IT staff via help desk tickets. Moreover, it
Business process supports automatic email notifications amongst collaborators for further action. Yet, it helps in defining
business processes with well-defined activities and measuring KPIs to assess the performance of IT staff
and processes.
Ó 2019 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an
open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

1. Introduction In that regard, building a successful help desk system requires

meeting the following basic requirements:
An IT help desk system has become a vital need for large insti-
tutions that rely heavily on IT services and resources. This is due to
the fact that it serves as a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) between
the IT staff and users regarding the requested services and reported
issues. Moreover, it facilitates the management of IT tickets and
enables the automation of day-to-day IT tasks (e.g., assignment
of tickets to service agents, email notifications for related parties,
etc.). Furthermore, it can help define and minimize the activities
that comprise the different business processes. In addition, it
allows the evaluation of the overall IT department performance
based on generated reports and assessed key performance indica-
tors (KPIs). Not to mention, the use of such software in an organi-
zation leads to increased productivity, better quality of service and
improved customer satisfaction.
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: firas.alhawari@gju.edu.jo (F. Al-Hawari).
Peer review under responsibility of King Saud University.
 In-house development to offer a cost-effective, fast and flexible
custom solution to all ongoing IT service needs.
 Integration with the employee portal to allow accessing all
online services from a single point with same login credentials
and less system setup.
 Support all activities in an incident management process such
as opening, classifying, prioritizing, assigning, resolving, docu-
menting, archiving and closing an IT incident.
 Enable collaborators to exchange comments and files regarding
an incident, which makes users happy as they can interact with
IT agents to clarify the problem or understand the resolution.
 Provide email notifications to keep all respective parties
informed upon every ticket update.
 Automatic classification and routing of tickets to the responsi-
ble IT agents in order to minimize the ticket resolution time
and enhance user satisfaction.
 Generate reports to measure the KPIs needed to evaluate the
health of the IT processes.

Accordingly, this paper has three main contributions: the first

Production and hosting by Elsevier contribution is related to the features of an online help desk

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2019.04.001
1319-1578/Ó 2019 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718
system that has been developed in-house to keep meeting the
ongoing IT needs of the German Jordanian University (GJU), the
second contribution focuses on the methodology that has been
empirically identified to generate an accurate machine learning
model for classifying help desk tickets to their correct services
from the beginning and therefore reduce ticket resolution time
and boost user satisfaction, and the third contribution deals with
the ability of the system to facilitate the definition of clear-cut
activities in a business process as well as measure the different
KPIs needed to evaluate the performance of the IT staff and pro-
cesses. The introduced system also enables GJU employees to
report issues, request services and exchange information (e.g.,
videos, files and comments) with the IT staff through help desk
tickets that are managed from the MyGJU portal (Al-Hawari,
2017, Al-Hawari et al., 2017). Furthermore, it allows the IT personal
to define the offered services, administer user roles, manage tickets
and generate reports that help in decision making from the admin-
istration portal. Moreover, it supports automatic email notifica-
tions to all respective parties upon every ticket update for
further action.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: a comparison to
related work is considered in Section 2; the in-house help desk sys-
tem and its capabilities are discussed in Section 3; the experiments
that were performed to develop a methodology to generate a
machine learning ticket classification model are presented in Sec-
tion 4; the validation and results of using the help desk system
to define an IT business process and measure needed KPIs to eval-
uate the performance of IT staff and business processes are illus-
trated in Section 5; and a summary as well as conclusions are
provided in Section 6.
2. Literature review
The importance, requirements, advantages and challenges of
using a help desk system in an organization were explored in
(Serbest et al., 2015; Cater-Steel et al., 2016; Keller and Midboe,
2010; Cusick and Ma, 2010; Tang and Todo, 2013; Tanovic and
Mastorakis, 2016; Tanovic et al., 2016; Harcenko et al., 2010;
Jäntti, 2012; Robles, 2018). Specifically, the Information Technol-
ogy Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework of best practices for
delivering IT services (Cater-Steel et al., 2016; Keller and Midboe,
2010; Cusick and Ma, 2010; Tang and Todo, 2013; Tanovic and
Mastorakis, 2016; Tanovic et al., 2016; Harcenko et al., 2010;
Jäntti, 2012) emphasized the positive influence of a help desk sys-
tem on the implementation of the incident management process.
For example, according to (Keller and Midboe, 2010; Cusick and
Ma, 2010; Tang and Todo, 2013; Tanovic and Mastorakis, 2016;
Tanovic et al., 2016), a successful help desk system needs to sup-
port key activities for the ITIL incident management process such
as identification, logging, categorization, prioritization, assign-
ment, diagnosis, resolution and closure. Besides, it was shown in
(Tang and Todo, 2013; Tanovic and Mastorakis, 2016; Tanovic
et al., 2016) that help desk systems facilitate the measurement
and improvement of the KPIs for the IT business processes. Some
important KPIs to measure in that regard as discussed in (Tang
and Todo, 2013; Tanovic and Mastorakis, 2016; Tanovic et al.,
2016; Harcenko et al., 2010) are: percentage of incidents fixed at
first level, average number of incidents per day and incident aver-
age lifetime. Nevertheless, it was identified in (Jäntti, 2012) that
incident classification is always a challenge to many help desk
users and thus it must be addressed to minimize the ticket resolu-
tion time. Furthermore, the importance of resolving discourse dur-
ing problem resolution in help desk interactions was highlighted in
(Robles, 2018). Accordingly, this paper introduced a help desk sys-
tem that supports the needed activities in the ITIL incident man-
703
agement process, allows measuring KPIs to evaluate the IT
processes and provides an automated solution to the ticket classi-
fication challenge.
The analysis, design and implementation of help desk systems
that allow adding only a simple ticket description were discussed
in (Ismaili et al., 2018; Akinnuwesi et al., 2014; Tehrani and
Mohamed, 2011). Moreover, a multimedia chat services architec-
ture for help desk that is applicable to call centers was introduced
in (Shae et al., 2008). Yet, a web-based help desk system that uses
rule-based reasoning for fault diagnosis and video conferencing for
enhanced customer support was introduced in (Foo et al., 2000).
Besides, a help desk system that supports peer-help amongst stu-
dents in a university course was shown in (Greer et al., 1998). In
addition, visual dashboards for help desk tickets monitoring were
illustrated in (Zhu et al., 2017; Ilieva et al., 2016). In that regard
and unlike the prior systems that only addressed some aspects
related to IT service management, the proposed help desk system
supports various features that facilitate IT process management
as well as ticket service classification. Specifically, it supports
managing ticket basic information, comments, CC list and files.
Moreover, it allows managing services and user roles. Also, it sup-
ports rich text editing, email notifications and reports generation.
Similarly to this work, several help desk systems such as those
in (Jan et al., 2015; Wongsakthawom and Limpiyakorn, 2018; Zhou
et al., 2016; Silva et al., 2018; Agarwal et al., 2012; Son et al., 2014)
also explored the use of text classification techniques (Kintsch and
Van Dijk, 1978; Aggarwal and Zhai, 2012; Joulin et al., 2017;
Joachims, 1998) to automatically categorize and route tickets to
the right IT group for handling. For instance, a probabilistic text
analytics framework for IT ticket annotation and search based on
ticket title and description was presented in (Jan et al., 2015). In
addition, in (Wongsakthawom and Limpiyakorn, 2018), the The-
saurus API was used to obtain a proposed category for a help desk
ticket based on its title. Moreover, a multi-stage technique that
combines ticket title (summary) pre-processing, grafting and
machine learning for bug report classification was discussed in
(Zhou et al., 2016). In (Silva et al., 2018), a machine learning model
based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) and K-Nearest Neigh-
bours (KNN) was explored to automate incident categorization
using ticket description and other attributes such as ticket id,
owner, contact source and severity. Likewise, a tool that combines
SVM and discriminative term-based classification approaches to
automate the dispatch of a ticket to the correct resolution group
was introduced in (Agarwal et al., 2012). Another tool that uses
either Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB) or Softmax Regression Neu-
ral Network (SNN) text classification approaches to categorize user
tickets was illustrated in (Son et al., 2014).
A key features comparison between the proposed classification
model in subsection 4.3 and its aforementioned counterparts in
(Jan et al., 2015; Wongsakthawom and Limpiyakorn, 2018; Zhou
et al., 2016; Silva et al., 2018; Agarwal et al., 2012; Son et al.,
2014) is shown in Table 1. Accordingly, the model used in the help
desk system is the only model that uses a combination of ticket
title, description and comments to construct the training values
and hence it should be more accurate than all the other models
in Table 1 according to the empirical results discussed in subsec-
tion 4.2. Furthermore, applying text pre-processing, stop words
removal and stemming techniques on the training data ahead of
generating the model similarly to (Jan et al., 2015; Son et al.,
2014) further improves the generated model accuracy relatively
to (Zhou et al., 2016; Silva et al., 2018; Agarwal et al., 2012).
Furthermore, unlike this work, several other help desk systems
such as those in (Aggarwal et al., 2016; Walek, 2017; Wang et al.,
2008; Mr and Kavitha, 2017; Wang et al., 2011) used some sort of
classification models that utilized help desk tickets for purposes
other than categorization (e.g., prioritizing tickets, duplicate tickets
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Table 1
Comparison of classification model to related work.

Model Type Ticket Ticket Ticket Text Pre Stop words Stemming
Title Description Comments Processing removal
Help desk model Machine Learning Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Jan et al. (2015) Probabilistic Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes
Wongsakthawom and Limpiyakorn Thesaurus Database Yes No No No No No
(2018) API
Zhou et al. (2016) Machine Learning Yes No No No Yes Yes
Silva et al. (2018) Machine Learning No Yes No No Yes Yes
Agarwal et al. (2012) Machine Learning No Yes No No Yes Yes
Son et al. (2014) Machine Learning Yes No No Yes Yes Yes

identification). For example, in (Aggarwal et al., 2016), a system
called ReAct was illustrated to easily identify a set of possible
actions to resolve an issue mentioned in the ticket description.
Moreover, an expert system to evaluate the importance of inci-
dents based on fuzzy IF-THEN rules was introduced in (Walek,
2017). Finally, several methods to identify duplicate tickets/bugs
were also explored in (Wang et al., 2008; Mr and Kavitha, 2017;
Wang et al., 2011).
3. Help desk system
The help desk system is a web-based Java EE (Juneau, 2013)
application that enables GJU employees (i.e., customers) to request
services online from the IT center (i.e., IT service provider) at the
university. It has been developed in-house for continual cus-
tomization to meet the ongoing requirements of both the GJU
employees and IT staff. Furthermore, it is implemented based on
a 3-tier client–server architecture in which the client (where the
user interface is presented), application (where the application
logic is processed), and data (where the data is managed) tiers
are physically separated (i.e., executed on different devices or ser-
vers). Moreover, it supports viewing information in both the Eng-
lish and Arabic languages. In addition, it is integrated with the
Human Resources (HR) system to access all the needed employee
data and with the MyGJU portal (Al-Hawari, 2017, Al-Hawari
et al., 2017) to make the help desk services available to all GJU
employees. Besides, it communicates with the Microsoft Active
Directory (AD) (Iseminger, 1999), in which the login credentials
of all employees are stored, for user authentication purposes.
The system supports the following four user roles: super admin,
service admin, service agent and customer. A super admin has
access to all features of the system including managing services,
subservices and user roles as shown in the use case diagram in
Fig. 1. On the other hand, as shown in the use case diagram in
Fig. 2, a service admin can manage the respective service tickets,

Fig. 1. The use case diagram for the super admin user role.

Fig. 2. The use case diagram for the service admin, service agent and customer user roles.
 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718
whereas a service agent is mainly responsible for responding and
handling the designated tickets. Finally, a customer may open tick-
ets from the MyGJU portal to report a technical issue or request IT
services.
Accordingly, the system has two main views: Admin and Cus-
tomer. The Admin view is accessible to any user who is granted a
super admin, service admin or service agent role. Whereas, the
Customer view is available as a service from the MyGJU portal to
any employee with an active account in the HR system. The sup-
ported capabilities in the system are discussed in the following
subsections.
3.1. Managing services
The offered IT services in the system can be managed (i.e.,
defined, edited, deleted, activated and deactivated) by only super
admins from the Admin view using the Manage Services screen
shown in Fig. 3. Based on Fig. 3, the number of defined IT services
is 22 including the other services not shown in the Figure which
are: Information Display System (Al-Hawari et al., 2017), Library
Systems, MyGJU Portal, Networks, Office 365, Phones, Projectors,
Sound Systems and Surveillance Cameras. Furthermore, a service
can be subcategorized into more specific subservices for better
management from the Manage Subservices screen shown in
Fig. 4, which can be accessed upon selecting the respective service
(e.g., the Technical Support service) and then clicking the Manage
Fig. 3. The manage IT services screen.
705
Subservices button in Fig. 3. According to Fig. 4, the Technical Sup-
port service is subcategorized into 13 subservices. Correspond-
ingly, the GJU employees may seek support from their IT
colleagues in any issue related to the defined services and
subservices.
3.2. Managing user roles
The different user roles (i.e., super admin, service admin or ser-
vice agent roles) of the IT staff in the system can be administered
(i.e., defined, granted and revoked) by only super admins from
the Admin view using the Manage Users screen shown in Fig. 5.
User roles are granted to IT employees relevant to their responsi-
bilities and positions in the organizational structure of the IT cen-
ter, which is managed by a director and is divided into several
divisions each supervised by a division head. The director and each
division head may have assistants to help them in their daily work.
Each division is responsible for at least one service and contains a
group of employees who actually perform the related tasks.
Accordingly, the super admin role is typically granted to the direc-
tor and the assistants to the director so they can administer ser-
vices and user roles, as well as monitor all help desk tickets.
Besides, a service admin role is granted to the head and the assis-
tants to the head of the division responsible for the respective ser-
vice to assign its tickets to the available service agents. Finally, the
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Fig. 4. The screen to manage the subservices of a selected service; specifically the subservices of the selected Technical Support service in Fig. 3 are shown in this example.

Fig. 5. The manage users screen.

service agent role is granted to the specialized employees within
the responsible division to handle their assigned tickets.
According to the example shown in Fig. 5, the service admin
user role on the Technical Support service is granted to two
employees (e.g., the Technical Support division head and assistant
head) and revoked, possibly due to change in responsibilities, from
another employee. Furthermore, the selected employee in the Add
User Role screen in Fig. 6 will be granted a service admin role on
the ERP Systems service upon clicking the Save button. It is worth
noting that, the Add User Role screen can be reached by clicking
the Add button in the Manage Users screen in Fig. 5. Moreover, a
granted (i.e., active) user role can be revoked (i.e., deactivated)
by unchecking the Active checkbox in its respective row in the
Users table in Fig. 5.
3.3. Managing and routing tickets
A help desk ticket is the mechanism that enables an employee
to report an issue, submit a service request and communicate with
an IT agent via the help desk system. It contains a basic informa-
tion section as shown in Fig. 7 that consists of a ticket number
(i.e., unique automatically generated identifier), creation date, pri-
ority (either Emergency, High, Normal or Low), service name (e.g.,
Systems Services), subservice name (e.g., Data Center), assigned
agent name, status (either Open or Closed) and close reason (either
Fixed or Void). Additionally, its description can be edited via a rich
text editor (see Fig. 8) to format text, check spelling, embed videos,
insert images and add web links. Besides, it includes the contact
information of the employee who opened the ticket. Moreover, it
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Fig. 6. The add user role screen.
might be associated with a CC list (see Fig. 9) of additional agents
who need to have edit ticket privilege similarly to the assigned
agent so they can all work together to resolve the ticket. Further-
more, it can be linked with a group of uploaded documents (e.g.,
IT User Guide) to be shared amongst its stakeholders (see
Fig. 10). Finally, it incorporates a comments section (see Fig. 11)
that allows collaborators to interact with each other by exchanging
ticket related messages.
Most of the aforementioned ticket attributes are editable by all
users, except for the Assigned To, Status and Close Reason fields, as
well as the CC list. As assigning a ticket to one of its respective
agents for handling is exclusive to super admins and service
admins, whereas editing the CC list and changing the ticket status
from Open to Closed (i.e., closing a ticket) or vice versa (i.e.,
reopening a ticket) are restricted to super admins, service admins
and assigned agents. Not to mention, super admins can manage
all tickets, while service admins may only administer their service
tickets. On the other hand, agents can only view and handle their
assigned tickets.
The IT center staff may administer (i.e., view, open, transfer,
assign, update, and close) their tickets via the Manage Tickets
screen shown in Fig. 10 and available from the Admin view,
whereas other GJU employees may only open, view and edit their
tickets from a similar screen in the Customer view accessible from
the MyGJU portal. Furthermore, a service agent could navigate to
the Add/Edit ticket screen in Fig. 7 to open/update a ticket upon
clicking the Add/Edit button in Fig. 12.
Fig. 7. The basic ticket information section in the edit ticket screen.
707
The ticket state diagram and automatic email notification sce-
narios are shown in Fig. 13. Accordingly, when a user opens a ticket
it will be in the Open/Unassigned state and automatically associ-
ated (i.e., routed) with its respective service admin. In addition,
automatic email notifications will be sent to its owner as a confir-
mation and to its respective service admin for further action. Next,
the service admin may assign the ticket to the responsible service
agent for handling when it is valid and correctly categorized (i.e.,
changes its state to Open/Assigned) or modify its service name to
associate it (i.e., transfer it) to the correct service admins when it
is erroneously categorized (i.e., keeps it in the Open/Unassigned
state, but under a different service). Respectively, the designated
service agent may decide to close the ticket in case it is void (i.e.,
modify its state to Closed/Void) or mark it fixed upon resolving
the issue or completing the service (i.e., change its state to
Closed/Fixed). Not to mention, automatic email notifications will
be sent to the ticket owner, service admins, assigned agent and
all agents on the CC list (if any) to keep all of them informed upon
every assigned ticket update.
3.4. Generating custom reports
The help desk system supports the generation of comprehen-
sive and customizable ticket reports that can be utilized to evalu-
ate the IT staff performance, estimate the needed IT resources,
measure the business processes KPIs and help in decision making.
Based on Fig. 14, the tickets report filtering criteria enables a user
to filter out tickets according to basic attributes such as: service,
subservice, priority, status, close reason, creation date, service
admin, service agent, etc. Furthermore, the columns to show in
the report are customizable according to the user preferences,
hence a user may customize the report to either include the default
columns, all columns or a group of desired columns. Yet, the cus-
tomized report can be generated by clicking the Search button in
Fig. 14. Not to mention, the produced report may also be exported
to an Excel file for further analysis or archiving upon clicking the
Export button in Fig. 12.
4. Machine learning based ticket classification
The association of a ticket with the correct service and subservice
in the first step (i.e., while opening the ticket) is critical to quickly
route it to the responsible service admin for handling and thus min-
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Fig. 8. The ticket description section in the edit ticket screen.

imize its resolution time. On the other hand, a wrong ticket service
classification leads to routing the ticket to the wrong service admin,
which might cause it to take a longer route with multiple erroneous
stops (i.e., irrelevant service admins) and extra delay (i.e., the time
wasted while trying to reassign the ticket to an accurate service)
at each stop until it reaches its correct destination (i.e., particular
resolution group). Hence, the ticket service misclassification leads
to longer ticket resolution time, wasted human resources and dis-
content customers. Therefore, a machine learning based ticket clas-
sification model needs to be developed and used in the help desk
system to assist users in selecting the right service from the start.
Associating a ticket with one service out of several possible ser-
vices is basically a multiclass document classification problem (Jan
et al., 2015; Walek, 2017) and hence is best solved using super-
vised machine learning algorithms (Walek, 2017) such as: SVM,
Fig. 9. The CC list section in the edit ticket screen.

Fig. 10. The ticket files section in the edit ticket screen.
 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718 709

Fig. 11. The ticket comments section in the edit ticket screen.

Fig. 12. The manage tickets screen.

Naïve Bayes, Rule-based and Decision Tree. A supervised learning
algorithm learns a classification model based on sample input–out-
put training data (e.g., tickets pre-labeled with the correct respec-
tive service) as shown in Fig. 15. Consequently, the trained
classification model acts as a function (i.e., classifier) that maps
(i.e., classifies) an input (e.g., ticket description) to an output
(e.g., service). It is worth noting that a Vector Space Model (VSM)
is initially needed to transform the training text data to feature
vectors to be fed into the machine learning algorithm.
Accordingly, the process to generate a custom machine learning
model suitable for ticket service classification is quite involved as it
depends on several factors such as: training data, text preprocess-
ing, feature vectorization, machine learning algorithm and algo-
rithm parameters. Therefore, the WEKA1 version 3.8.3 tools
(Witten et al., 2011) were used in several experiments to identify
the needed steps to build an accurate ticket classification model that
1
https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/.
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Fig. 13. The ticket state diagram and automatic email notification scenarios.

can be used in the help desk system. The training data, conducted
experiments and adopted methodology to produce the required
model are discussed next.

4.1. Training data Fig. 15. The machine learning method for ticket classification.

The training data is built from the ticket information that is

stored in the help desk database. The ticket’s basic information
(entered via the screen in Fig. 7) and description (added via the
screen in Fig. 8) are stored in the TICKET database table that is
included in the ER diagram shown in Fig. 16. The TICKET table is
also associated with a TICKET_COMMENT table to save the ticket
related comments that were exchanged by collaborators through
the screen in Fig. 11. Each ticket is identified by a unique ticket_id
and is associated with a service_id and subservice_id. Whereas, a
ticket comment is identified by a comment_id and is related to its
ticket via the foreign ticket_id key. A reply comment is related to
its parent comment via the foreign parent_comment_id key. The
ticket title is entered via a text field and hence it is saved in the
database as specified. On the other hand, the ticket description
and comments are composed using a rich text editor and thus their
stored text usually contains automatically generated (by the edi-
tor) html tags and attributes (in bold) as shown in the sample
tables in Fig. 17. The TICKET table in Fig. 17 contains 3 tickets with
identifiers (i.e., ticket_id) 101, 200 and 354 respectively. In addi-
tion, ticket number 200 has a comment (with a comment_id equal
1) and a reply to that comment (with a comment_id equal 2) in the
TICKET_COMMENT table.

Fig. 14. The filtering criteria for generating a tickets report.

 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718
Each Weka training input line consists of a value-label pair sep-
arated by a comma. The training value of a ticket could be a com-
bination (concatenation) of its title, description and comments
with the subservice_id as a label (given that the service_id is fixed).
The ticket training value combinations that were used in the exper-
iments in the next section to find an accurate classification model
are as follows: only description (named Description), title com-
bined with description (named Title_Description), and title com-
bined with description as well as comments (named
Title_Description_Comments). Correspondingly, the 3 possible
training values for ticket number (i.e., with ticket_id) 200 are
shown on the top of Fig. 18.
Another aspect that was researched in that regard is the impact
of preprocessing the tickets training values on the classification
results. The preprocessing module uses a regular expression
method (see Fig. 19) to clean up each ticket value in the training
data from unnecessary HTML tags, punctuation and special charac-
ters (e.g., commas, periods, quotes, brackets, parenthesis, etc.).
Accordingly, the corresponding 3 preprocessed values for ticket
number 200 are shown at the bottom of Fig. 18.
4.2. Ticket classification experiments and results
The first experiment was conducted to determine the machine
learning algorithm that produces the most accurate ticket classifi-
cation model. The training data is comprised of 1254 technical sup-
port tickets that were manually labeled with their correct
subservices as shown in Fig. 20. Note that, based on Fig. 4, the tech-
nical support service is categorized into the following 13 subser-
vices: Computers Connections and Parts, Printers, Scanners,
Fig. 16. The ER diagram for the TICKET and TICKET_COMMENT tables.
Fig. 17. An example TICKET table instance and its related TICKET_COMMENT table instance.
711
Operating Systems, Microsoft Software, Other Software, Other
Hardware, Labs Setup, Internet Access, Anti-Virus, Copiers, Check
Phone and Check Projector, which are associated with subservice
identifiers (Ids) from 1 to 13 respectively. Each ticket was repre-
sented with its unprocessed description in this experiment. The
J48 (Tree-based), DecisionTable (Rule-based), NaiveBayes (Bayes-
based) and SMO (SVM-based) algorithms with their default WEKA
parameters were used in this experiment. In addition, the
StringToWordVector VSM with its default parameters was used
with the four algorithm runs. Accordingly, the elapsed times to
build and test the respective classification models using the previ-
ous algorithms are shown in Fig. 21. Based on that, the SMO algo-
rithm outperformed its counterparts in building and testing the
ticket classification model.
Moreover, each generated model was validated using 331 test
tickets and the prediction results are shown in Fig. 22. Therefore,
the results of experiment 1 suggest that the SVM-based SMO algo-
rithm is the candidate algorithm to use when building a ticket clas-
sification model as it is also the most accurate amongst its
counterparts. Lastly in experiment 1, in an attempt to improve
the prediction results, the feature vectorization parameters were
fine-tuned by setting the IDF (i.e., inverse document frequency)
and TF (i.e., term frequency) flags to true. In addition, the Lovins
stemmer Witten et al., 2011 was enabled. Then, the four algo-
rithms were revalidated based on the new settings. The results in
Fig. 23 illustrate that the accuracy of the SMO algorithm has
increased from 53.8% to 59.5% and is still considered the best rela-
tively to its counterparts.
The effect of preprocessing (as discussed in subsection 4.1) the
ticket description on the classification accuracy was explored in
712 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718

Fig. 18. The three generated unprocessed and processed training values for ticket number 200 in Fig. 17.

Fig. 19. The regular expression method used to preprocess a ticket description.

Fig. 20. The distribution of the technical support training tickets into their respective subservice Ids.

experiment 2. Accordingly, the validation results in Fig. 24 show
that the prediction accuracy of the SMO algorithm jumped up to
69.9% and remains the best compared to its counterparts. There-
fore, the preprocessing step should always be considered in the
proposed methodology to clean up the training tickets values from
the unnecessary text that surely has a negative effect on the clas-
sification accuracy.
In experiment 3, the effect of including more unstructured
information in the training and test ticket data on the classification
accuracy was explored. Accordingly, in addition to the original data
 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718 713

Fig. 21. The elapsed time to build and test the classification models using the four
machine learning algorithms. Fig. 23. The prediction accuracy of the four generated models when the TF-IDF
feature vector and Lovins stemmer were enabled.

Fig. 24. The effect of the ticket text preprocessing on the prediction accuracy of the
Fig. 22. The prediction accuracy of the four generated models using the default four generated models.
feature vectorization parameters.

set (i.e., the Description combination in subsection 4.1) that
included the tickets preprocessed description, the following two
data sets were produced: a data set that incorporates the tickets
preprocessed title and description (i.e., the Title_Description com-
bination in subection 4.1) in each ticket instance, as well as
another data set that contains the tickets preprocessed title,
description and comments (i.e., the Title_Description_Comments
combination in subsection 4.1). The validation results shown in
Fig. 25 illustrate that the SVM-based algorithm ranked first in all
cases, the Title_Description data set had a minor effect on the val-
idation accuracy, and the Title_Description_Comments consider-
ably increased the validation accuracy of the SVM-based
algorithm from 69.9% (i.e., when the Description data set was used)
to 81.4%.

Fig. 25. The effect of considering the ticket title and comments in addition to its description on the prediction accuracy.
714 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718

Hence, the capability to allow exchanging ticket comments 4.3. Model generation methodology
amongst users proved to be a key factor in improving the valida-
tion accuracy, which can be attributed to the fact that most com- Based on the results of the previous experiments, the steps
ments are initiated by service agents and hence they mostly (shown in Fig. 26) to produce an accurate and fast ticket classifica-
contain service related information that mostly contribute to the tion model are described below:
machine learning process. Moreover, the inability to increase the
validation accuracy further can be due to the following three rea-  Generate training ticket instances that include ticket title,
sons. Firstly, the ticket might describe different types of performed description and comments
services and therefore can be correctly classified to multiple sub-  Preprocess each ticket instance using a regular expression
services. Secondly, the unstructured ticket text may not contain method to remove the html tags and special characters from
any service related information to aid in classifying the ticket. its text
Thirdly, the number of training samples for a certain service might  Use the Lovins stemmer
not be enough to yield an accurate prediction.  Apply the TF-IDF feature vectorization

Fig. 26. The tickets classification model generation methodology.

Fig. 27. The IT Issue Process activity diagram.

Fig. 28. The number of tickets opened each month from the launch of the system until November 25, 2018.
 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718 715

 Run a linear SVM-based machine learning algorithm to generate
the tickets classification model
Moreover, the ticket classification model needs to be regener-
ated at the end of each day to take into account the newly added
tickets information in the machine learning process and hence
incrementally improve the accuracy of the model.
to Closed and sets the close reason to Fixed. Otherwise, the service
agent closes the ticket and sets its close reason to Void. In the pre-
vious two scenarios, the customer is also notified regarding the
ticket status changes via email to confirm the resolution of the
issue.
5.2. KPIs measurement

5. Validation and results The help desk system captures and produces a lot of useful data
that enables the measurement of various KPIs that aid IT manage-
The validation and results of using the help desk system to ment and staff in decision making. Examples on some of the mea-
define the IT business processes and measure the KPIs used to eval- sured KPIs are discussed next.
uate the main business objectives of the IT department at GJU are
discussed in the following subsections.
5.2.1. Number of tickets
5.1. Clear-cut business process definition This KPI is used to find the total number of opened tickets dur-
ing a selected period of time. For example, the number of tickets
The help desk system facilitates the definition of business pro- that were opened each month from the launch of the system in
cesses comprised of clear cut activities due to the following rea- February 2018 until November 2018 are shown in Fig. 28. Corre-
sons. First, it serves as SPOC between the IT staff and their in- spondingly, the overall number of tickets logged in the system as
house customers. Second, it supports well defined user roles and of November 2018 is 2664 tickets, the maximum number of tickets
responsibilities, as well as distinct ticket services and states. opened in one month is 447 in October 2018, and the minimum
Finally, it automates the email notifications to the respective par- number of opened tickets in a month is 175 in May 2018.
ties upon every ticket update. For example, the IT Issue Process
was easily defined as shown in Fig. 27 by clearly outlining its activ-
ities based on the roles of their obligated users (i.e., customer, ser-
vice admin and service agent). Furthermore, the related help desk
ticket information and email notifications were the focal point of
contact amongst the IT staff and requestor in most of the process
activities.
Specifically, the aforementioned IT Issue Process begins when a
customer opens an issue ticket via the help desk system. Conse-
quently, the in-charge service admin receives an automatic open
ticket notification via email. In response to that, the service admin
evaluates and assigns the ticket to an available service agent via
the help desk. Upon receiving the respective assigned ticket notifi-
cation via email, the service agent verifies whether the issue is
valid. In case it is valid, the service agent performs the following Fig. 30. The number of tickets that were assigned to each of the main technical
activities: fixes the issue, tests the fix, changes the ticket status support service agents in October 2018.

Fig. 29. The total number of tickets opened against the main IT services in October 2018.
716 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718
Also, the system allows measuring the number of tickets
opened against each service over a certain period of time. For
example, the number of tickets opened against the main IT services
in October 2018 are shown in Fig. 29. Accordingly, the number of
technical support service tickets was much larger than that of its
counterparts, which is expected as this service is subdivided into
13 subservices (shown in Fig. 4) that are directly related to the
day-to-day tasks of all the GJU employees.
Moreover, it supports finding the number of tickets that were
assigned to each service agent over a certain period of time. The
goal of this KPI is to keep its value as close as possible for all
respective service agents to make sure the work is distributed
amongst them. For example, the number of tickets that were
assigned to the main technical support service agents in October
2018 are shown in Fig. 30. Accordingly, the reported KPI values
were about the same for most agents, as desired, except for two
agents (i.e., WS and TH) who turned to be part timers.
Fig. 31. The distribution of all tickets based on priority as of November 2018.
Fig. 32. The percentage of the closed to overall tickets for each of the main services as of November 25, 2018.
The measurement of the number of tickets per priority over a
certain period of time is also supported. For example, the distribu-
tion of all tickets based on priority as of November 2018 is shown
in Fig. 31.
5.2.2. Ratio of closed to overall tickets
The system allows measuring the percentage of closed to over-
all tickets for any service during a selected period of time. The busi-
ness objective for this KPI is to keep its value as close as possible to
100% to make sure that the number of unresolved tickets is mini-
mized. For example, the measured values of this KPI for all main
services as of November 2018 are shown in Fig. 32. Based on that,
each service except the ERP Systems service maintained a KPI value
above 92%, which is considered acceptable. However, a KPI value of
65.83% for the ERP Systems service can be justified as some of its
tasks require developing new software features that either need
a long resolution time (e.g., several months) or are postponed
due to the unavailability of developers.
In addition, it is capable of measuring the percentage of closed
to overall tickets for any service agent during a selected period of
time. Based on Fig. 33, the KPI values for the technical support ser-
vice agents OK and ZS are 99.54% and 98.48% respectively, which
are considered excellent.
5.2.3. Average ticket assignment time
This KPI is used to compute the average ticket assignment time
in a selected period of time and thus measures the responsiveness
of the IT staff to the user requests. For example, the average ticket
assignment times for the top six services in Fig. 29 as of November
2018 are shown in Fig. 34. Accordingly, the Projectors service had
the minimum average ticket assignment time of 5 h, whereas the
ERP Systems service recorded a maximum ticket assignment time
of 39.1 h. While the mostly demanded Technical Support service
achieved an acceptable ticket assignment time of 19.6 h (i.e., less
than a day). Accordingly, most teams assigned their tickets in
hours and in less than a day.
5.2.4. Average ticket resolution time
This KPI is used to compute the average ticket resolution time in
a selected period of time. For example, the average ticket resolu-
tion times for the months from February to October 2018 for the
 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718 717

Fig. 33. The number of closed vs open tickets for the technical support agents OK and ZS as of November 25, 2018.

achieved results are related to the fact that the resolution of a tech-
nical support ticket might require scheduling an appointment
according to the availability of the requestor or performing multi-
ple visits to repair a hardware part, for example.

6. Summary and conclusions

The capabilities of an in-house help desk system that meets the

Fig. 34. The average ticket assignment time for the top six services in Fig. 27 as of
November 2018.
technical support service are shown in Fig. 35. Accordingly, the
minimum average ticket resolution time of about 2 days was
observed in February, whereas the maximum ticket average reso-
lution time of about 4.59 days was recorded in August. The
ongoing customization IT needs of the GJU were introduced in this
paper. The system enables users to report an issue, submit a service
request and communicate with an IT agent through help desk tick-
ets. It also supports prioritizing a ticket, classifying a ticket, assign-
ing a ticket to an agent, editing a ticket description using a rich text
editor, exchanging ticket comments amongst collaborators, and
changing the ticket status. In addition, it allows managing services,
administering user roles, generating automatic email notifications,
and producing reports that help management in decision making.
Furthermore, a methodology has been developed to build a
machine learning model that allows the automatic ticket classifica-
tion from the start and therefore reduce the ticket resolution time
and ensure customer satisfaction. The steps to build an accurate
and fast ticket classification model are as follows: generate training
ticket data that includes ticket title, description and comments;

Fig. 35. The average technical support ticket resolution time in each month from February to October 2018.
718 F. Al-Hawari, H. Barham / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences 33 (2021) 702–718
preprocess the ticket data to remove html tags and special charac-
ters; apply Lovins stemming; use TF-IDF feature vectorization; and
run a SVM-based machine learning algorithm to generate the
desired model. Nevertheless, the experimental results illustrated
that including the ticket comments, in addition to its title and
description, in the training tickets data was one of the key factors
to improve the produced model prediction accuracy from 53.8% to
81.4%.
Moreover, it was illustrated that the help desk system enables
the development of IT business processes comprised of well-
defined activities as it is considered a SPOC between the IT staff
and users. Also, it has been shown that the system allows the mea-
surement of several KPIs (e.g., number of tickets per agent, ratio of
closed to overall tickets, average ticket resolution time, average
ticket assignment time, etc.) needed to evaluate the performance
of the IT staff and business processes.
Conflict of interest
We confirm that there is no conflict of interest.
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