What is the difference between the Caller vs On behalf of for an Incident?

[jaalstead]

Hello,

Our help desk agents are struggling how to fill these fields in when someone calls the Help Desk for an issue someone else is having. Example: The CEO's administrative assistant calls in to report an issue for the CEO.

I realize the Help Desk agent is going to be in the Opened By.

BUT, who should go in the Caller field and who should go in the On behalf of field?

Are workflows and notificaitons typically driven/sent based on the Caller or the On behalf of?

I know we have a higher SLA for VIPs, but it is currently set up on both the Caller and On behalf of field so we are covered from an SLA perspective.

Are there any ITIL best practices for filling in these fields?

We may need to change the label to help our HD folks out, but wanted to be sure we didn't encourage them to do something we shouldn't.

Thanks!

[Alejandro RP]

Hi,

I think the 'On behalf of' field is not a Servicenow OOB field.

Normally the only fields are Opened By and Caller.

Do you have the 'On Behalf' field on your incident table?

Thanks.

[Anish Reghu]

Are both the fields mandatory - especially 'On behalf of' (custom field)? If not, the field is for specific scenarios. Track the relevant user story to check the Acceptance criteria.

[Appli]

Hi Jason

Both fields are OOB.

as per your example:

1) CEO can open a tool and report an incident. In this case:

opened by = CEO , caller = CEO

2) CEO can ask assistant to open an incident on behalf of him/her. In this case:

opened by = Assistant , caller = CEO

To sum: "Caller" is the actual user affected by the issue. "Opened by" is the user who actually created the Incident in the tool. 

Hope it helps

[Priyanka Vasant]

Hi Jason,

Caller is the user on behalf of whom the incident is being reported. Two cases arise here.

Case 1:

The affected user themselves are creating the incident, in which case Caller is the current user creating the Incident. There is another field Opened by, which in case will be same as the Caller.

Case 2:

A user or Service Desk agent is creating the incident on behalf of another user. In this case, Caller is the actual user affected by the issue. Opened by is the user who is actually creating the Incident.

Mark helpful or correct based on impact.

Regards,

Priyanka