Service Desk Tier 1 team use of KB Articles

[Blue]

Does your IT Service Desk use KB articles solely to guide them on how to troubleshoot and resolve or escalate incidents or do they use some other knowledge or training?

In other words, are they required to pull up a KB article when they take a call to assist someone and reference that KB article in their steps? or do they wing it from memory or use another tool?

[Mohan raj]

Hi @Blue,

IT Service Desk agents generally rely on KB articles to troubleshoot and resolve incidents, case and problem. While experienced agents may use their knowledge, they typically reference KB articles to ensure accuracy and proper information given as per company policies.

Other tools and training may also be used, but KB articles remain the primary resource if all the article are created in ServiceNow otherwise agent may go for another tools.

If my response helps you, please mark it as "Accept Solution" or hit the thumbs up to indicate it was helpful.

[Ralph Hand]

Our service desk primarily uses a service desk focused knowledge base.  We also have a knowledge base for tier II teams to store their SOPs.     our service desk has struggled a bit since we went to servicenow three years ago because we switched the model to one article per issue and they were used to one article per CI.  longer serving agents still struggle adapting to having to add more than just one word to bring up the right article.   

Our service desk knowledge base is curated by the service management team to ensure consistent tone and clear messages.  Tier II articles are curated by Tier II teams.   We also have a customer facing KB which is curated by the Service Management team to ensure that articles are understandable by non technical users.

The best part of using service now for knowledge is that feedback can be provided directly in the tool and the appropriate author can be notified directly and that knowledge can be linked directly to ticket resolution so you can see which articles are working and which aren't.

[LeighAnnB]

For us, it’s kind of a mix. We definitely have training, but there’s so much the Service Desk is expected to know that having a solid KB is essential - especially for newer team members who don’t have years of experience to lean on.

Using the KB isn’t strictly required on every call, but it’s heavily encouraged. Most people will reference it when they need a refresher or when they’re handling something they don’t see every day. We are pretty new to using ServiceNow so our team is loving that they can search directly in the ticket and either follow internal step-by-step articles (like how to reset an email password as an admin) or attach a user-facing article (like “How to Reset Your Exchange Password”) depending on what the caller needs.

We have four main KBs: team-specific ones (like for Help Desk or Physician Trainers), a department-specific one for IT, and two that are end-user facing - one for Epic and one for general IT stuff.  Before ServiceNow, everything was in a shared OneNote where all Service Desk members could change anything at any time, which caused some chaos. Moving to a more structured KB has definitely helped with consistency in solving issues and sharing updates to the entire team in one place.