Do you expose incidents to all of your employees/end-users?

[Monica11]

I wasn't sure if I should post this in the ITSM forums or here where the focus in more on customers/employees. Let me know if I should move/repost elsewhere.

Today, we only allow users to see incidents and other records that are their own or they have been added as a watcher to. Because of various security and privacy concerns, it has always been 'easier' to establish that limitation. However it makes it difficult for users to say "Hey, I have that issue, too!" and throw their hat in the ring without forcing them to go through a chatbot or service desk or form submission themselves. I am curious how others have set forth solving this with high customer satisfaction.

Expose incidents that users can search through and allow adding to watch list? Or automatically creating a child ticket at the click of a button?

Alert system that allows users to subscribe for updates?

Something else?

NOTE: We are on the Vancouver version.

Thanks in advance for your time and discussion.

[VL10]

For major incidents or outages we allow "automatically creating a child ticket at the click of a button" by having a button "I'm Affected" on a outage announcement on the portal.

We don't do that for non major incidents on the user experience as we prioritize quick capture of their issue, through the channels we recommend (i.e, portal or VA and not email) and did not think they had the time or cared about whether others had the same issue but would have agents do the relating if necessary.

Are you differentiating between IT and Business users or would your Business users be interested in doing this and you would drive CSAT up for them as well as IT users?

[Monica11]

That sounds more in line with what we're looking for. At present, this is exploration. We differentiate by using our access governance system. Without having a role defined there, they are considered a business user while anyone with a role there is a platform user. We do have non-IT users of the platform for various ITSM products so it isn't as easy as saying whether or not they are in IT.

Our CSAT regularly shows this frustration as do regular non-ServiceNow surveys we send to the business units. They will post to internal forums (community driven, not monitored by support teams) that they have the issue which appears to indicate they are OK with simply saying 'I have that, too'. Clicking from an announcement, which we do provide already, doesn't seem too much of a stretch to drive them towards that. Sometimes their issues are not MIs or outages. Or at least not yet declared so. A side effect of this could help declare multi-user outages more quickly and/or allow contribute data to better measure the impact of the issue.

[VL10]

Perhaps it could work to broadly categorize the issue on intake to present related issues and provide a me too option?

An infrastrucure issue like Network Performance or External Internet Access should be easy as should Business Application / Application Name.   Depends on your intake method, if it is a custom portal form (as opposed to the vanilla OOTB “Something is Broken”), should be doable on Virtual Agent.    That could be something to explore as opposed to presenting a list of open issues for them to say I have that 3rd one on the list.   Just thinking out aloud.

[Monica11]

Our intake method is multi-faceted: Phone a service desk, chat bot, online form submission. We have a customer portal now but are evaluating employee center and other options.