Request and request item notification help

[Richard78]

Hello everyone, I'm hoping you can help me...

We have redone our REQ/RITM notifications several times now and we are looking for inspiration on how to best handle them.This is being triggered by customer feed back saying initially there was not enough information in the notifications and too many notifications, more information was provided and reduced notifications to just on open, close and comment for RITM (initially we did open and close on REQ as well). Now we are still hearing that there are too many emails.

Can you please share with me how you are handling REQ/RITM notifications?

NOTES:

• We are currently sending notifications to the customer on RITM open, close and comment, not sending for REQ.
• I have provided some options: Using a email script, at the REQ table, to get the RITMs and status' and only sending notifications on REQ open, close and RITM on comment. Stay with how it is. Only notify on the REQ open, close and comment; which means add commenting to the REQ level pushing all comments to the RITMs, likewise comments on RITMs are added to REQ.
  
• We are not live with portal for non-technical reasons.
• We are only processing incidents and request through email.
• We have repurposed the "Calls" plugin to collect all inbound new emails, to process into Incidents or Requests.
• We are sending notifications on Call created and transferred or closed.
• We implemented only a month ago, previous system customer would send an email and it would just be turned into a ticket directed to a group and worked completely from one ticket. Now we are breaking it up into different requests and incidents based on what they are asking for. This where I feel the real issues is, but we do not want to return to dumping everything into a single generic request/incident.
• Current RITM emails have the below format:

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

At a certain point you've got to stick to your guns as best as possible if you feel you're doing the right thing. Too many emails is always a complaint that end-users say, but then it's "not enough" the other times...

For requests...we personally don't do any notifications on that level as the RITM is where the show really is.

So...we have a few:

-Submitted (to let them know it was successfully submitted and received on our end)
-Approved (whether that was by their manager only or after all secondary and tertiary levels of approval have been passed)
-Rejected (if not approved...obviously)
-Commented (if the technician asks for more information etc).
-Completed

There is a mail script called: variable summary, you can look at and place that inside your submitted notification if you wanted to give them more information or a "copy" of the variables they filled out and what they selected.

We also have this variable summary in the assignment of tasks to groups as well and in the approval emails that go to our approval groups/users.

Since you've said the portal is not live....they really have nothing else to go on. So at least giving them back a copy of the variable and selections as interpreted by your system is a nice touch.

Otherwise...please...for the love of the end-user...get your portal up and running. Heh...

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!