Need help to define a unique "incident" to a servi

[tmack]

ITIL defines an incident as "any event which is not part of the standard operation of a service and which causes, or may cause, an interruption to, or a reduction in, the quality of service."

I'm trying to figure out how to meet customer demand and price "per incident" in a service offering rather than "per call". My numbers thus far show an average of 1.35 calls per incident (status requests, updates, re-opens) What would qualify an incident to be unique from another?

If caller & configuration item are the same and than "?" seems like there needs to be another component to defining if an incident is a duplicate or not, I'm trying to outline this before it becomes a problem later down the road once engaged in service with a customer saying "hey you logged multiple incidents on the same thing".

[Diarmid]

tmack,

Incidents are events and not calls. You do not need any calls to have an incident (an automated system could trigger an incident logging as could a member of IT operational staff) and however many calls you get related to the same event, that is still one incident.

Of course this is not always obvious at the time and it is not unusual for more than one incident to be registered because two calls arrive at much the same time or because different symptoms are reported in more than one call. But that can all be rectified later. There is also the danger of a repeat occurrence being confused with the earlier one, but a repeat occurrence is a separate incident.

There are also tricky situations in which an underlying incident has wide-ranging effects that may be better managed separately.

If you are charging for the management of each incident, then you are presumably a third party support organization that is not otherwise managing the service (and/or your customer is a service management function), since it seems perverse to charge customers for the occurrence of incidents in a service that you are managing and supposed to be aiming to keep incident free.
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