Best Practice for Service Documentation in Field Service Management

[davidbuesch]

Hi everyone,

we are currently working on improving our service documentation process in FSM and would love to get some input from the community.

Our current setup

• Our FSM agents document their activities in the Activity Stream (comments).

• In addition, they fill out a questionnaire that covers general items such as:

  • “Was the site accessible without issues?”

  • “Was a customer signature obtained?”

• Both the comments and the questionnaire responses are displayed in the Document Template, which we use for work acceptance with the customer.

• On top of that, the comments are also shown directly in the customer portal for transparency.

 

The challenge

Once the Work Order is closed and the Document Template is generated, any mistakes (e.g., spelling errors or unclear wording) can no longer be corrected:

• Neither the questionnaire responses

• Nor the Activity Stream comments are editable after closure.

Looking ahead

We also want to leverage AI in the future to:

• Automatically summarize the technicians’ activities

• Rephrase and improve wording for customer-facing communication

• Ensure a kind of quality check (spelling, grammar, clarity) before content flows into the final service report.

Our questions to the community

What is the ServiceNow best practice here?

• Which fields do you use for documenting technician activities?

• Do you allow technicians or dispatchers to make corrections after closure, before the final report goes out?

• Has anyone already implemented AI-driven summaries or text optimization in FSM?

• How do you manage the separation between internal notes and customer-facing information in your Document Templates?

Really looking forward to hearing how others have solved this!

[Joshua Chen MTL]

I am curious as to why you are adding the work notes in the PDF? is this a requirement from your customer?

When you bring your car to the dealership, do they put all the staff comments on the receipt/paperwork that you sign? mine don't and i don't expect to have that on this paper, i just need a list of the work that has been done ''oil change, tire alignemtn, etc.''

customers already have access to the WO/WOT details from the portal. 

//

quick fix would be to limit string field in the questionnaire  and use yes/no, chocies question to reduce spelling errors

//

the ootb behavior you mentioned is correct - you cant edit after closure. It would add overhead or an extra step, but you could disable the flow/script(?) that attaches the PDF to the WOT. Review the PDF, and make correction then attach it to the WOT. this is very manual process and will make the actual data in the WOT fields and the content of the PDF mismatch.

[davidbuesch]

Hi @Joshua Chen MTL , thanks for your reply! Since we have a wide variety of different orders, we cannot use a standardized questionnaire. However, we want to work with it in the future and specify the answers using the Questionair questionnaires by asking questions such as “What measures were taken to resolve the problem?” We are currently considering how we can create a way for technicians to reopen and edit a problem they identify in the questionnaire in the app and in the workspace.

[Skylar_Barth]

Hey @davidbuesch , you may be served well by the automations feature within Smart Assessments