Closing tickets due to lack of response - how do you manage and track this in SNOW?

[bostonsnow]

Hello all,

I'm wondering how others are managing the scenario where you close a ticket due to lack of response from reporter. This isn't too hard to track when you're not dealing with a lot of tickets but when you have hundreds of tickets, how do you manage this? Please bear with me, somebody came to me with this issue and I'm trying to help, I've described the issue as best I can below...

Here's an example of the process we might follow:

1. A user opens a ticket for an issue.

2. I investigate the issue and post an update to the ticket asking the user for more information.

3. After a set period of time the user doesn't respond so I post another update to the ticket requesting more information.

4. After a set period of time the user doesn't respond so I post another update to the ticket requesting more information.

5. After a set period of time the user doesn't respond so I close the ticket.

The issues we are facing are:

1. How would I track which number attempt I am making to contact the user?

2. What if the user responds on the 3rd attempt and then it goes back to Step 2, how do I "reset the clock"

Has anyone else run into this situation and are they are out of the box solutions available? I know SNOW Support follows a process like this, just wondering what the process and workflow is behind it.

Thanks!

Mike

[darlawolf]

When I was a service desk and Servicenow admin and the SLA clock was running, anytime I needed information from the caller and waited for their response I set the state to On Hold pending additional information.

When the caller responds, I have configured the incident form to automatically set the status back to Active/Work in Progress.

If the caller does not respond, I have a dashboards that I check to see number of incidents on hold pending additional information and arranged oldest to recent. My manager then gave a directive to try 3 times (ping them via ServiceNow and call them). If they still do not respond after 3 attempts the ticket is closed with a closed code "Assumed Solved" and the close notes I indicate the attempts.

You could probably have a ticker on # of attempts, for my experience we didn't do that as the attempt is timestamped when additional comments are added.

[Charlie21]

Hi there,

How did you manage to configure your incident form to automatically come off Hold when a caller responds? I can't seem to figure it out! 

Thank you,

Charlie

[Jonathan Ting]

Hi Charlie,

You can create a business rule on update that contains a script to check the following. 

• Has the comments been updated
• Was the comment from caller
• Is the ticket in a 'On hold' state

If that statement is true to change the state.

Cheers,

JT

[Warren Pilkingt]

Good morning Mike,

Apart from the business rule suggested below, you could also add some additional states for say incidents, so that as well as your updates to the notes, the incident state could be set, for example:

• Awaiting first response
• Awaiting second response
• Awaiting third response

(the status updates would also update the incident record as well because it's a status change)

You could also have a close code that says "No response received" or something similar, so if you are having to close with no response you can categorise them on close. 

That may also prove useful for reporting as you could run reports based on the states and close codes.

There may be business rules you could do which could advance the state, so for example if no response after a time period from setting third response, automatically set call to closed with the "no response received".