Best Practice? customers responding via email to Closed Incidents

[SD33]

Customers responding via email to CLOSED Incidents (they are responding to email notifications from ServiceNow that their ticket was RESOLVED, but don't realize or care that the ticket is already closed)

What is the Best Practice on dealing with customers trying to comment on closed tickets?

At our company, if a customer receives an email that their Incident was Resolved, they have 3 options in that email: 

     1) Click here to send comments to the support analyst but not change the status of the Incident  (this adds additional comments to the Incident which triggers an email to the Assigned to but doesn't change the status of the ticket.  This is for general comments/questions)

     2) Click here if your issue was not properly resolved and you want to reopen the Incident (added an additional comment to the Incident and reopens it)

     3) Click here to close the Incident (they get 7 days from when the Incident was resolved before the ticket auto closes)

Note: They do not get another email when the ticket closes. The last email they received was that the ticket was resolved. 

If they choose any of the above 3 actions AFTER the ticket CLOSED, their comments are updated into the Incident Additional Comments, but no one gets any more email notifications.  So the 'Assigned to' nor 'help desk' know that the customer sent comments and the ticket was updated. The comments are posted but ignored unless stumbled across. The Customer doesn't get any notification that indicates the ticket is CLOSED and being ignored.  

We need to change something in our process. It isn't ok that our customers are being ignored and they are complaining about it.  So I am trying to figure out how others are handling this.  I have seen multiple people say they are turning off the ability to respond to an email after it is CLOSED.  And lots of people saying they ignore these comments since the ticket is CLOSED. 

Are companies really just ignoring all email responses made after the ticket was CLOSED?

I would think the least we can do is an email back to the Customer telling them the ticket is CLOSED now and explain the process of how to create another ticket if needed.   

Thoughts?

[Mohit_Gupta]

Hi @SD33 ,

OOB only ITIL_Admin can close the ticket you should remove third point from your notifications should create another notification to inform customer that ticket is closed.

And in Second point you should mention if you wanted to reopen please respond within X days otherwise it will close automatically.

Below link will provide you more info

https://www.servicenow.com/community/it-service-management-forum/who-can-close-the-incident/m-p/4582...

I hope this helps 

Please mark my answer correct if this helps you 

Thanks

Mohit

[SD33]

that was helpful, and definitely an option, thanks.  

Anyone else have any other comments on Best Practice?