How to avoid confusing users because of Incidents created for status calls

[joshar713]

Hello,

I'm a member of an IT Service Desk that uses a third party Call Center integrated into ServiceNow. We have issues where a user will call in and an Incident (INC) will be created for them, it'll get routed to wherever it needs to go, and so on. But if the user calls back to get a Status or request Escalation, the Call Center will generate an INC which ends up confusing some users because they already have an INC open. Even if the Service Desk Agent processes everything correctly, the user can get confused and sometimes irritated because when the Agent closes the INC that was only for requesting status/escalation, they think their original issue has been resolved when it clearly hasn't been.

Aside from having the Call Center no longer automatically generate INCs from every call, is there anything within ServiceNow that could help this situation? I'm familiar with CALL records--we used them in the past--but I think ServiceNow calls them Interactions now? Is there any way we can leverage Interactions to work in this current situation, or would it really just be a matter of changing how our Call Center handles things?

Thanks!

[SAI VENKATESH]

Hi @joshar713 

For this question the main point is that we should not accept duplicates so to do that 

1: by writing business rules we can prevent automatic creation of new incident id there is existing open incident for the same Caller 

2:you can use notification updates to let the user knows about their status of open incidents 

please feel free to ask if any questions 

Regards

sai venkatesh 

[Dhruv Chandan]

Hi,

Creating an interaction each time is appropriate and the recommended approach. However, the team should avoid creating a new incident each time from the interaction. Instead, they should search the system for active incidents and link the new interaction to the relevant active incident. This is how the interactions are intended to work.

Hopefully this helps.

Thanks & Regards,

Dhruv

[leopeay]

Is there any particular reason ServiceNow did not use the same convention of "Opened By" and "Opened For" across both Interactions and Incidents?  Certainly the use of the handle "Caller" in incidents is rooted in history though it can be confusing today as in call center/service desk situations where the caller is calling on behalf of someone else who is actually the opened for person and not the caller.