Communication from incident to customer

[Max Nowak]

Hi,

I'm interested in what experiences all of you made regarding the communication from an incident to the customer, with CSM enabled. The following is my current understanding on how it should be handled 'by the book':

1. Customer creates case, reporting that he can't use a certain service
2. CSM agent accepts the case, identifies it as incident, creates an incident
3. ITSM agent accepts incident, but needs more information from the customer
4. ITSM agent creates an additional comment on the incident and sets the state to "On Hold", which gets posted as a work note to the case
5. CSM agent, who hopefully has notifications for work notes activated, relays the ITSM agent's question to the customer via "Request Info"
6. The customer responds, and it now is the CSM agent's responsibility to relay this information to the ITSM agent (via a work note on the incident, I guess? Or does the ITSM agent get notified whenever a case related to their incident updates?)
7. The ITSM agent is able to solve the problem and resolves the incident

This all seems like a lot of overhead and relying on the CSM agent noticing and quickly acting on things like a work note getting added to their case.

If you use CSM with ITSM, do you actually work this way, or do you use a different solution?

[mcconnellsj]

Hello Max

This is indeed the OOTB solution and I guess the communication channel between IT and the customer (whether direct or via customer service) is dependent on the service IT provide to the business and also the size of the customer estate.  A smaller company with a small customer base has the latitude to deal with customers directly.

The incident record could actually be the beginning of a whole incident / problem / change process and perhaps the incident is one of several related to the same issue, and so the overhead is not really an overhead but a wrapper around the detail to protect the customer (and CSM agent) from too much info.

How do we do it?  Pretty much how you describe, but in terms of notification we do have several custom ones like "Case Updated Internally" and also colour styles on the case numbers in the list to indicate an internal update.

When ITSM is needed there isn't really a cleaner method that allows IT to deal with an incident in the same way, whether from CSM or internally.  I guess that is the idea.

S.