How to keep track of incidents with new user comments?

[Jesper Slot]

Hi,

I'm new to ServiceNow and working in a company which is going to switch to this tool. Still trying to wrap my head around this product.. 🙂

Lets say you have a large volume of incidents in your Service Desk pool and the supporters have to request more information from a bulk of the incidents.

In our current service management system the stage/status is updated with a "responded" label, which makes it easy idenitifable on the list of incidents. What is best practice in ServiceNow for keeping track of the requests which get updated by the end-user?

I see we got watch list and activity stream in ServiceNow. How does this work with a large volume of incidents?

[Michael Fry1 · Accepted solution]

Not sure there is a best practices, but will share what we did.

In the Incident we use the On Hold State, with on hold reason and follow-up date. Then we have a script that sets a checkbox if the Caller replies to the email or updates the ticket:

We use a simple Field Style to show a green dot next to the Number to indicate that the Caller has updated the ticket:

Works great for us.

[Niels Aksel]

Hi Michael,

I think your solution looks really good - and no need to customize the state values

one question - how do you clear the checkbox again? users do that manually or do you have another business rule for this?

[Rob Bushrod]

Hi Jesper,

We have created a custom field on the form called Condition which is a choice list and then a list of possible conditions that the ticket can go into and then based on this the Service Desk know what follow up action is required. One of our conditions is Task Updated and another is No Updates; the task updated shows that some update has been placed in the ticket and the no updates is control on a contract properties and is a timer so if no update by a human has happened in 'x' amount of time it will flag and the Service Desk Agents will follow up with the end user or resolver for the latest update.

Works well for our needs and we help the agents out by giving them a report on a homepage that shows them the number of tickets in the conditions per hour.

Rob

[Allen Andreas]

As others have mentioned, you can create a custom state like "Awaiting User Info" which is what we do. We've also created an "Awaiting Vendor" if it required 3rd party assistance.