[tetha]

Indeed, very much this. We spent some efforts structuring this at work and now we have 2-3 rules in place. First off, all requests for work and services are always issues either directly in the ticket system, or via mail to a central mail address. Nothing from chat will reliably trigger any work done.

However, we have defined a role "first contact". This role rotates on a weekly basis, and whoever is first contact has the job of monitoring some well-known channels for requests. They then act as a first level support pretty much, helping people to figure out how to best request what they need. They also handle mails that aren't automatically handled in the central mailbox.

The latter in turn enables the team to just ignore pretty much all chat notifications outside of the team. First contact person will ensure they are heard, and first contact person will also address high severity tickets directly to people after creation. And as much as that sounds like a slower process, it has improved our resolution times because people aren't distracted as much.