Dealing with External Contacts in ServiceNow

[Community Alums]

We recently rolled out ServiceNow and it's been fine so far but one of the issues we're dealing with is how to work incidents from external contacts who are not in the system. Anyone not in the system gets put under the Guest account and it makes notifications difficult as by default no notifications go out to that account and the email is guest@example.com.

We've been told by our consultants not to use the create users automatically in the email properties and to use watch lists instead. Workers have to manually add the email to the watch list in order for the external contacts to get notified and I'm working on automatically adding it in the inbound email action but not sure if this is the correct way to approach it.

I'm curious to see how others have dealt with this issue and if some have activated the create users automatically function. If you did, what were the pros and cons in doing so? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Aryanos

[Community Alums]

Hi Bessam,

Thanks for the advice and that will come in handy if we do decide to go that route. There must be others that have to deal with external users out there and I'm curious how all of them are doing this.

[sgrison · Accepted solution]

Really your only options have already been mentioned:

1)   Create the user.   You can add an additional field to flag them as external users (if needed)

2) Set the caller to 'guest' and use another field for communications.

Are there many users who will email SNC?

I've worked with 2 companies in this situation -   both decided to create a new field on the incident table to capture the email address of the end user.   The incident was logged with a caller of 'guest', the email address field was auto populated.   We used a UI Policy to show the email address field if the callers name was 'guest'.   Then created/updated the email notifications to only use the new email field on the incident table when the caller was guest.

[Community Alums]

Thanks Sean, this is probably the direction we're going to take.

[divya vellanki]

hi sgrison,

I am new to service now its been a month i am working on it. I came across this situation  in my office. could you please elaborate it by providing screen shots.

Thanks.

[Linda Kendrick]

We do the Guest option as only have our internal users from LDAP imported.  

The email received is populated in the Guest Email field. The Service Desk then determines whether to add the email address to the watch list. The email is not automatically added to prevent spamming someone.

Here are screen shots...

Hope that helps.