Ticket Resolution and supporting self-service / Ticket reopening.

[Lehans]

1. Many tickets are resolved on the phone with the service desk through relatively quick fixes. However, from recent experiences with several end-users, it seems that many issues may reoccur within a short time, and frequently the individual doesn’t immediately call back until they get really frustrated with the issue and want immediate escalation.
   
   Are there ways we can get our end users to affirmatively confirm an issue is resolved, and give them the ability to reopen a recent ticket (last 3 months maybe?) when they experience a recurrence? I think tracking the count of times a ticket has been re-opened could have a lot of value and may also alert us to people who are having consistent issues and are likely to escalate.

[ryan_pope]

ServiceNow does provide this capability with incidents natively through the use of 2 system properties (one toggles the autoclose of an incident from "Resolve" to "Close" automatically, and the other indicates how long the incident should sit in a resolved state before automatically being set to close). Over the years the default is to have autoclose turned on, and set anywhere from 3-7 days. Here's the docs site on how that all works: https://docs.servicenow.com/en-US/bundle/sandiego-it-service-management/page/product/incident-manage...

While you can prolong this for 3 months, I would advise on keeping it much shorter. If the end user experiencing the issue is having trouble but can't bother to validate for 90 days, there's another issue afoot that should be addressed with level-setting on expectations. To have the service desk tending to reopened cases can ruin metrics, and can be quite distracting to those agents. I would ensure proper organizational change management to share what the expectation is for how long incidents will remain "re-openable", and if the issue persists beyond that initial window, you've missed the statute of limitations and need to open a new incident.