Where are your customer visible task notes?

[kchorny]

When we first tackled implementation and customization of ServiceNow, one of the most confusing concepts to grasp was the Request/Item/Task relationship and more specifically, comments and update notifications to the customer.   We were advised by our PS team that our Additional Comments (customer visible) should NOT be available on the task form.   However, we find management of notifications to be cumbersome and limiting by not having the ability to update the customer from the task.   So as a work around, we put the Item comments on the task form, which really just creates more confusion with our technicians and with notifications.  

I'm having a hard time understanding, after over a year of dealing with it this way, why they discouraged us from adding customer visible comments at the task level...?   I'm getting ready to jump in and make this change, and would like some insight into what problems I may be causing in the future, if any.

Thanks!

Karla

[Mike Allen]

Everywhere I have been has used that field on the task.

[kchorny]

Thank you, that's good to know... and that brings up other questions.

Consider this scenario:

You have a Request with one Item, and that Item contains multiple tasks.   The tasks are NOT all assigned to the same group as the Ownership group of the item.

- A technician in one of those other groups is assigned one of the tasks, and needs more information from the customer, so they pose their questions in the customer visible comments of the task.

- The customer then goes to the portal to answer rather than replying to notification.

- ServiceNow standard practice is to expose just the item to the customer, so the customer opens that item and either a) sees unrelated or no comments or b) sees the comments because there's a business rule that copies comments from the task to the item.

- Assuming b is true, the customer updates the item with the additional information that was requested.

How does the technician that asked the question get notified that there was a response?   How does the update get copied to the appropriate task?  

Thank you again

Karla

[Sam Ogden]

HI Karla,

We are having the exact same issue when it comes to the Service Portal.

We don't have customer visible notes on the task at present, and the customer only sees the item.   It has been asked if we could copy the notes from the task to the item via a business rule so that the customer can see these, but as you mentioned when there are multiple tasks for an item that are with different groups it could easily cause a lot of notes being added to the item in no real order.

We have created a notification that is sent to everyone assigned to tasks linked to that item when an additional comment is added to the item by a customer so we would know once they have responded.

I was just wondering if you had come up with any solution that you have found works?

Thanks

Sam

[kchorny]

I ended up making the changes I mentioned, and then copying the comments from the item to the task and vice versa.   I add some text in front of the task comment in the item, describing where the comment came from.   All notifications come from the task comments, no notifications are triggered by the item comments.   This has worked pretty well for us, but we don't have a lot of items with multiple tasks that are customer facing, and we don't have a large number of end users using the portal.   I suppose there's the potential for it to get confusing, but no more so then if we only collected comments on the item.