Incident Communication Templates & Lessons Learned

[dboudreau670890]

I am looking for ways to improve how ServiceNow can communicate incidents and outages to end users.  Basically how to get users to read the e-mail ServiceNow sends out.  

I'd love to hear from the community:

• What does your incident communication template look like?
• What information do you prioritize?
• What lessons have you learned about what users actually read (or ignore)?
• Have any changes improved user engagement or reduced follow-up tickets?

If you're willing to share templates, examples, or best practices, I'd appreciate seeing what's worked well in your organization.

Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences!

-David

[Mark Manders]

You need to start with realizing that this is a dream that will never come true. Basically everyone wants to be notified, but nobody wants to read the notifications. Especially on incidents. Those need to be resolved.

What worked best, in my experience, is to use clear start texts in the subject:
* Solved: your issue INC1234567 is resolved

* Action required: your issue INC1234567 needs your input

And state clear steps in the email

* 'Please provide us with XYZ so we can resolve your issue as soon as possible. If you don't reply within 2 days, a reminder will be send. Without any response to that, this issue will be auto-closed.'

* 'Your issue is resolved. In case you still are not satisfied, you can reopen it within 7 days'

* 'We received your issue  and are looking into it. It is set as a PX, which has an expected resolution time of PQR'