Incident Management lifecycle before auto-closure

[fscheps]

Dear community, I would like to ask you what is your best practice experience for auto-closure of Incidents in your organizations.

An Incident can be open for how long before its assumed for example that the provided solution was accepted? Or you immediately resolve the ticket and leave it open for re-opening by the user for a period of time?

Thanks for sharing your experiences!

[Chuck Tomasi]

Hi Fernando,

Common practice is to leave the incident in a resolved state for a period of time. ServiceNow lets you set this period with a system property (default is 3 days.) During that time the caller can dispute the resolved state and move it back to an open/WIP/active state to continue work if they have additional questions or issues. If they do not response within the time specified by that property, it gets closed automatically. If the user still has issues, best practice is to open a follow up incident rather than re-open.

Incident Management - ServiceNow Wiki

[fscheps]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Currently we are using the "Awaiting User Info" state that stops the SLA and we try to wait for the end user ´s confirmation before actually moving the INC to a "Resolved" state.

If after 7 days the person doesn't provide any feedback, we send them an automatic reminder and give them 7 additional days to reply. If he still doesn't, then we auto-resolve the ticket due to lack of feedback and then after 7 more days since the ticket has been Resolved then it gets into "Closed" state automatically. Only when in Resolved state the ticket could be re-opened.

This approach is generating several discussions, like if this is too much time for a ticket to remain open without any activity and such.

I feel that the perception from our end users if we use the word "Resolved" as a status visible for them is that we really don't know if the issue was really resolved or not, and its not nice for a customer to receive a "Your Inc. has been resolved" if its not true or confirmed.   To address this we are thinking on renaming the state "Resolved" to "Solution Proposed" similar to how HI from ServiceNow handles the tickets. And we could place two buttons on the bottom of the notification for the end user to confirm if his issue is actually resolved or not.

But then still, how much time would be prudent to keep the Inc Open or in this state until auto closed?

To give a little bit of context, we are a company using ServiceNow for internal customer support for around 80K users in more than 90 countries, so we need to seek alignment before implementing something like this.

[Chuck Tomasi]

Thank you for the additional information. Terminology can make all the difference in perception to the end users. Sometimes changing things like "Resolved" to "Solution proposed" help a lot. It's a minor thing to change (a label on a choice list option) and it goes a long way.

As for "is this too much time", that depends. What are you measuring? If it is agent response then that should be revealed in the SLA reports. Do you want to know what total open-close time is? Does it matter if it was 'resolved' in 10 minutes, but took 14 days to close out? It really depends on what you want to measure/track and improve.

Waiting for the end users is a tricky thing that you need to understand and work out - you want to be fair to give them a chance to respond in most cases. If you want to measure that, add another metric or SLA if your goal is to shorten that time. Don't forget about additional reminders with given dates. For example "Your incident has been marked as Solution Proposed. If you agree, click this link... If we don't hear back from you in 3 days, we will automatically close the issue."

A few tips:

• Determine what the issue is.
• What do you need to measure to understand it and improve it.
• Communicate expectations.

[amlanpal]

Hi Fernando,

Just sharing my experience. After being resolved, if the user doesn't get back in 5 days (there was 3 days scenario in one of my previous project also) the incident should get auto-closed.

Again, it's a decision which should be taken based on the organization's business perspective. Hope you already know, still sharing to make you clear that from ServiceNow end, it is even possible to achieve to set auto-close after 1 day or even after 1 month for above scenario.

I hope this helps.Please mark correct/helpful based on impact