How to find if external client made a comment or corresponded to a ticket

[Community Alums]

I have service requests that come in from clients into ServiceNow.  When we respond to them, we set the state to Waiting-Client.  I need to be able (though automation, probably with flow designer) to tell if there has been any client activity in X hours.  What is the best way to find out if there has been any activity from the client?
is there a better way than looking at the sys_journal_field table?

I just need to see if there was a comment from the user (external)  and return a true or false to move to the next flow step.

Thoughts?

[JP - Kyndryl]

Hi Stephen,

Are you able to track the udpates of the comment by the user (external) with a BR,  that will then set a "Updated by client" value in a custom field.

This custom field can also be set to "Waiting client" when you begin the wait.

A metric definition can then be created clocking the time this custom field is in the "Waiting client" stage.

Report your timing with the incident_metric DB view where the definition is the new one you created.

Regards.

JP

[Community Alums]

This will not be used with reporting but with creating a flow of some sort that will send a "Nudge" to the client that they have an action waiting for them.  This will need to be checked multiple times over many time periods (3 time periods)  Also, isn't the comment in the sys_journal_field table?  I need to see if there is a better way of doing this.

[Mark Manders]

Start with what JP said: create a field to capture the 'waiting info' (could be a tick box, or if you want to report on the 'when', a date time field or something like that.

That's the start of your flow: wait for x time to check if the field has been updated, if yes, do your automation, if no, send reminder or whatever needs to be done. Then wait x time.... etc.

This does rely on how the system is going to know if a response comes in from the client. Is that client always the 'opened by' or 'created by' or can it also be others? And if so: how do you know? If you can define that, you can have the custom field be updated (tick box to 'false' or date adjusted or whatever). Make sure you define the 'updated by client' part (a reminder sent will update the ticket and you won't want that to happen). 

If you don't want to create new fields for this, you could use the state 'waiting info'. The update from the client moves it to a different state and in this case the start of your flow would be setting the status to 'waiting info'.

If my answer helped you in any way, please then mark it as helpful.

Mark