It’s been recently brought to my attention that many customers haven’t heard about the Notify (com.snc.notify) plugin and how this can help them speed up their incident resolution especially during out of working hours.
For many years I have been recommending this plugin -along with the platform that supports it, called Twilio- in order to automatically contact an on-call resource as soon as an incident is raised during out of working hours. This allows the on-call resource to be able to use their time as they want while waiting for potential issues at the same time their company is sure they will be properly notified in a timely manner.
In order to achieve this desired situation it’s required to enable the On-Call Scheduling plugin (com.snc.on_call_rotation) as this one allows companies to define their on-call rotas.
Once the company has set up the different rotas required along with their schedules and team members, Notify can be used to configure the workflows required to contact the on-call person when an event happens.
For instance, we could configure ServiceNow to only assign incidents to the on-call resource if they are P1 or P2, leaving P3 and P4 for the standard teams that work within working hours. Then we can configure a workflow to call the on-call team member and act upon what happens next. In the workflow activities provided by Notify we can use the activity “Input” to tell the on-call resource that if they can deal with the incident they should press 1 to accept it. Otherwise, they should press "2". We must bear in mind an on-call member may be having an issue that prevents them from dealing with the incident, such as internet connection issues, hardware issues or a personal emergency.
If they press "1" we supress the notifications and let them work on the incident. If they don't pick up the phone or press "2" we can escalate the issue to their manager so that they can take the necessary action.
This is just one example of what can be achieved, but there are more ideas that can be implemented. Here are some I have seen implemented over the years:
- Using Notify along with a custom application to track cars and their owners within a campus so that in case they park their car in a forbidden place, we notify them with an SMS to move it ASAP
- Using Notify to send an SMS message to let stakeholders there’s a Major Incident going on and they need to join the bridge ASAP to help resolve it
- Using Notify to send an SMS message to let end users know something they requested is available for pick up
- Using Notify to call a user to inform them about a new password that has just been created for them
Please, bear in mind there’s a cost associated to this service and thus it’s have to be taken into account before proceeding.
All the companies I have seen using Notify were fully satisfied with it, have seen their response times improved and the resolution cost per incident lowered. I have been recommending it for years and will keep recommending it to those companies that need to achieve these kinds of goals. If your organisation isn’t using it, and is doing something similar, maybe it’s time to go for it.
Other blog articles created by me:
- Translating tickets out of the box using the Microsoft’s Azure translation services
- Avoiding time-consuming transactions being automatically cancelled
- How to give your scripts a beatiful aspect in KB articles
- What is the Data Certification Plugin and how can it be leveraged?
- Validating Service Catalog variables following the best practice
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