Creating templates for our service desk by choosing a Configuration Item or something else

[Jill Achanzar]

Hello, 

I do apologize if I didn't select the correct forum. 

I did try searching in the Service Now Community for this answer, but did not turn anything up to this specific question.

I use Service Now, but sadly, I am not a Service Now Developer and we do not have any Developers on staff.

We do have many Knowledge Base Articles available, but from being a service desk specialist in my past role, I found that our level one service desk analysts have trouble gathering the perinent information from the customer that is helpful for our other team analysts. 

Our Service Desk Analysts are not trained with those applications, so they don't really know what to ask. 

Instead of relying on that individual to look for the KBA and choosing the correct one, if it is named correctly or has the correct metadata so it can populate, this would be much more consistent.  They have a time limit of 10  minutes for each call. 

I use templates for both my Request and Incident queues.  I was told that Service Now does not have templates for Service Desk Analysts.  I'm not sure if that is true or not. 

Idea  1

With the new Tokyo version we have, is there a way to have a template created specifically for one team to say, "We need this information in order to help the customer resolve their issue" and attach it to a Configuration Item  and when the Service Desk Analyst chooses the CI, then it would pre-fill the ticket with information that needs to be asked of the customer?  Maybe as well as a subcategory of that CI, such as Printing, mapping a printer, etc?

Idea  2

Maybe those questions can be pulled into the ticket by creating a subject, have the questions added in there by each of our teams and if they click on that KBA, it would populate the questions into the ticket?

This would be for both Request and Incident tickets. Currently, they do not cross over into these 2 categories, you have to add those templates in each.  I had to add my templates in both Request and Incident tickets, even if it was the same template.

I have attached an example of what the ticket would look like if those pre-filled questions were able to populated in a ticket. 

Thank you so much in advance for any help or feedback you can provide. 

[DrewW · Accepted solution]

I see two options off the top of my head.

Option 1 - Use the Form Template functionality that ServiceNow has and name the templates based on Service name.

https://docs.servicenow.com/en-US/bundle/utah-platform-administration/page/administer/form-administr...

So if they call in about AppX then they search for a template named AppX and apply it to the incident and that populates the description with the question that needs to be answered.

Option 2 - Add a "Incident Support Questions" field to the CMDB table.  Make it a large textbox and you put all of the questions in there.  Then when the agent picks the CI/Service that the incident is for you can use a client script to copy the content of the "Incident Support Questions" field over to the description field.

Both options have there downsides.  Option 1 does not need any dev time to implement but it has a great deal of administrative overhead to maintain and properly name all of the templates which could be problematic if people use diff names for the same app.  Option 2 probably will have less administrative overhead if you use the business services but you are going to have to spend some dev time to build the scripts and add the field.

[Jill Achanzar]

Thank you again Kilo!

I will take this to our Director who works with Service Now and supports it. 

I'm thinking the 2nd option may be the best bet for us.