Self-Service Incident Form

[Aimee Jasso]

Hello, 

My team and I are in the process of redesigning some self-service items. We're finding that our users are submitting incidents for items that should be requests, we're also finding that we don't gather enough data from the user. We're particularly having issues with determining categories/subcategories. How did your teams determine category/subcategory/classifications for a self-service incident submission?

I reviewed the below link, which is almost where my question is geared towards. Upon selection of say "Something is Broken" or "I need to report an issue", what questions are followed? Do you display a "top 10 common issues" list for users to select? How were these questions determined? As of now, we have Hardware, Software, Communications, General and Administrative as our categories, we had intended to also make the subcategory field available to users, so they could select the category and it would automatically route the incident to the resolver group, but we think some users wouldn't always know what they actually need or fully understand the issue they are having. Some incidents could also be resolved by the Service Desk, which is where classifications would come in handy, but we're now kind of lost and the whole process has become a bit stressful. 

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=960c0b25db9cdbc01dcaf3231f9619ec

[James Rostron1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Aimee,

I can tell you about my experience with self-service.

We used to ask user's to self-categorise their incidents but found that getting the Service Desk to do this was far better as the SMEs. User's will always find shortcuts and provide incorrect categorisation resulting in poor quality of data. I have personally found this a much better way of extracting quality data.

On my "Report an IT Incident" form, i simply have 4 questions:

1. Affected User's Name: (sys_user table picker)

2. Incident Summary: (Free-Text- Character Limit set to 30)

3. Detailed Information about this Incident: (Free-Text)

4. Asset Number: (Not currently linked to asset management)

Under each of these I have included help-text such as:

1. If you are making a request on behalf of yourself, there's no need to change this since it should default to your name. If making a request on behalf of another user though, you can fill in their name here and IT will contact them directly for any follow-up.

2.Please provide a quick summary of your issue to help the Service Desk categorise this as accurately as possible.

3. Please provide as much information as you are able to (including any specific error messages) in order to ensure an efficient resolution. Upon receipt of the information, the Service Desk will categorise and prioritise it, at which point you will receive an automated email with a unique reference number.

You could make use of assignment rules to route the incident or request to the correct resolver group. I have made a series of "quick requests" forms such as, laptop, mobile, keyboard, mouse, usb and then created assignment rules so these go to our "desktop team". Instead of using category i have used summary for the auto-assignment as i have automatically set the summary in the record producer for the item.

Hope my experience can help you but ultimately I do think your never 100% likely to fix users logging requests instead of incidents and vice versa.

James

[Brandon R1]

Hi @James Rostron, can you provide a screenshot of what your self-service form looks like? I'm working on a similar self-service Incident form for non-ITIL users to fill out on their own and interested to see how you designed your's.

Thanks,

Brandon