Best practices for incident logging

sarahleighton · ‎01-24-2019

Our incident form was implemented as part of our start up 4 years ago, but everyone in our organisation hates it! Users don't understand what Business Service and Category to select when logging their incident. We are 100% self-service, but calls are being reassigned daily because users have learnt that regardless of what options they choose, the incident will eventually be passed to the correct team. This is not ideal for users or support teams picking up the incidents.

The fact hat people hate logging incidents in our ServiceNow instance means that there is a big priority to redesign the incident form. Our utopia would be to have one text field where users can input their issue, but this seems unachievable at the moment. Configuring everything to be auto assigned, whilst dealing with business services which are known by different users as different things is proving to be a mission.

So, has anyone got anywhere near our utopia of a single text field? Or could you point me in the direction of any resources or help with how to improve the experience of logging incidents for our users, whilst maintaining auto-assignment and 100% self service please?

Thank you in advance

Sarah

rahulpandey · ‎01-24-2019

Hey Sarah, I understand where are coming from. As a good practice, I would recommend you to use record producer to create incidents and don't allow users to interact with incident form directly. You can also use service now wizard to make it more interactive. Refer change module of service now where you never directly create change request using form but you use wizards. This will give you you more control on life cycle and data flow of incidents.

jeremymatthew · ‎01-24-2019

Hi Sarah,

we went live without any comms to users as we were targeting existing touch points to our service desk.

Email was our largest touch point for our folks (>50%) - Inbound action created incident from emails to our service desk. UX improved as incidents tracked with SLA and requester can check status at any point in time.

Walk-ins (>20%) - we had placed iPad at our walk-in counter for users to "take a queue number" which was the mobile app to create an incident. Dashboard flashed on TV showed who's next and how many in queue. UX improved as requester didn't have to guess who's next at the counter and they could decide to come in later if the number in queue were too many.

After these were covered for the bulk of incidents, we started building our service catalog. These redirected requests to respective teams based on the catalog items and/or options selected on our IT portal. We're still growing this and, unavoidably, there are requests still coming in for our service desk to re-assign but we're also training our service desk to provide direction to requester on which catalog item to select.

Seems like you opened up incident management to all, which we did not. Business users for us would not know what to select so only itil folks had direct access. Everyone else only had IT portal access. Logging incidents with "Something's Broken" record producer (>25%) with a free text field for description of issue and a selection for "Urgency" allowed folks to log incidents that our service desk agents would work on or re-assign where necessary.

Next step for us is to assess agent intelligence, once we've got a sufficient quantity of incidents, to auto assign based on the description of issue entered. Not saying that agent intelligence is our utopia but it may be worth looking at once we have sufficient

Whichever means you are looking at to reach your utopia, I would recommend looking at company culture/behavior and try to make things work based on your assessment. For us, we adopted incident management with minimal organisational change as that was the quickest to adopt. Once our folks found it easy, we tweaked it with baby steps. i.e. frog in boiling water.

Best regards and good luck,

Jeremy

Mike Mayer · ‎01-31-2019

Sarah,

You might find this article helpful: Design for an effortless self-service experience

ServiceNow customers have reached that pinnacle of self-service by driving users through the service portal versus directly to the incident form as the previous replies have suggested. The article linked above demonstrates how guiding users through a knowledge search prior to incident reporting, among other techniques, can improve self-service rates AND improve context for assignment should an incident still need to be opened.

Good luck, and report back with what you find!

Mike