Product feedback

[SNsucks]

My company recently switched to ServiceNow, and I think there's room for improvement at every level. That is, just about every feature of this software that I've dealt with is awful. I've used a handful of ticketing systems over my career, and this is the worst of all of them - and that includes some bad in-house ticket systems. Here are some thoughts:

Searching: searching tickets is an absolute pain. Many fields default to nonsensical comparisons (such as >= for strings), and assembling a complex search requires an absurd amount of clicking. Where I could build an exact query in JQL with ease, searching work orders in ServiceNow is a nightmare every time. The URL parameters during ticket searches suggest that there does exist some kind of query language under the hood, but from what I've been able to decode, it's all edge cases. 

Jumping to specific tickets: speaking of URL parameters, the URLs for single tickets are absolutely unreadable. Why use some horrendous internal ID to reference a ticket when the ticket number itself should be equally unique?

API: I don't have access to the API of my organization's instance, and judging by the documentation, that's a blessing in disguise. It's yet another case of "oops, all edge cases". Is this a software product or a shipping container of broken glass?

UI: where do I even begin? The cancel buttons on a ticket page have no styling to set them apart from nearby buttons (discuss, follow, etc.), so there's no visual indication that pressing them means canceling the ticket. Adding work notes to a ticket through the mobile web UI uses a native browser pop-up, which is a terrible for editing even moderate-length text. In fact, the entire mobile web UI is uniquely awful. 

"AI" features: for both of our sakes, I refuse to comment in detail on these. I don't want to needlessly triple the word count of this post, and you don't want to read that. The short version: knock it off. 

I can imagine that one response might be that my company is not using the software "properly", and that my complaints would be nullified if they were. I would not be surprised to learn we had some misconfigurations here and there, but I can't believe that's the source of most of my complaints. No simple misconfiguration would create such abysmal search functionality, for example - and if it did, then this software is even worse than I'd thought. 

Given all of the above, I am deeply at a loss as to why any company would willingly use ServiceNow. It has hampered my and my colleagues' ability to efficiently respond to client requests. Our clients struggle with the most basic features of incident reporting. The only users I can imagine being satisfied with it are out-of-touch and/or control-hungry upper management types who will never have to use the software themselves beyond viewing some asinine "employee performance" charts. Sure, ServiceNow has an impressive feature count, but if none of those features are good or usable, what's the point?