Comments on Knowledge Articles - Best Practice?

[Laurie12]

I'm looking at turning on the Comments field at the bottom of the knowledge article.  For the last five years I've had them turned off and only use the Helpful button and Flag Article, which is working well. I publish work practices, procedures and policies in my knowledge base and all updates/changes go through an approval process. I'm concerned about having open Comments on the articles that may mislead people or cause confusion. If someone makes an incorrect comment about a procedure/policy and others act on it, there may be risk. I'm also worried about the maintenance of comments. Does anyone have any experience with Comments working well on articles or would you recommend staying with the feedback process? If you use Comments, do you have any rules around how you monitor and maintain them? Looking forward to your comments!

[Dipesh Kalantri]

Hi @Laurie12 ,

Goal of knowledge feedback is to have actionable insights so action items can be derived.

We have enabled comments on Service Portal , apart from rating & helpful/not helpful.

We have observed that sometimes users just tick "not helpful" but this does not give any clarity as to which part of article was not helpful , did user faced any error while trying those steps etc and such feedback is not actionable to drive improvements.

Both Ratings & helpful buttons do not generate actionable insights and hence we believe comments are important to drive actionable input and improve article quality.

We have defined ownership groups for knowledge articles and we have created dashboards showing information related to feedback comments/low ratings etc where they can use it as self service , look for latest comments and verify comments against content of article and do required changes in article.

We also share the information to respective service owners related to feedback statuses and follow up for actions.

Regards,

Dipesh

[Mike Van Vooren]

Laurie, like you, we turned Comments off a number of years ago and I have no plans on turning them back on.  There are a number of reasons for this. 

• Comments on the articles were often used as a channel for IT support.  In other words, an article about requesting new hardware would have a comment like "I have a new hire starting next week and they need a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Can someone set that up please?"
• Comments were used as a sounding board for the topic.  They may not agree with reason for the existing issue to exist, like a restriction, and they would share that in the Comments.
• Comments were not up to date if the article was updated.  Not everyone responded to comments.  So it was possible someone called out an issue with the article, then the article was updated, and someone could come along months later thinking the article was still inaccurate after reading the Comment.  

Like others, we are using the Actionable Feedback (KFT) workflow to create tickets to capture feedback from low Star Ratings, Not Helpful ratings, and Flags.  This has worked well for us and no one has been asking us about turning Comments back on.

[Jeff Helms]

Comments are a great way to keep authors or ownership groups honest on article quality.  They are also a good way to close the loop as far as a feedback control system.  We leverage ServiceNow techniques to force ownership groups to take action on comments and 'acknowledge' them, removing them from the article view once addressed.  We also encourage our users to leave comments.

As Ashley Snyder said, "Feedback is a gift".  It is a gift that improves quality.  

[andreababch]

I'm very interested in turning back on comments for our public articles, but I don't want them shown to others and there is no feedback task. It seems ServiceNow does not work how it would be most helpful. I want the ability to:

• Comments generate task
• Not helpful generate box to ask why with task
• Comments generate box that says "thank you for your feedback", then hides the comment
  • We don't want to have to monitor for public bad feedback or start conversations on these

I don't want to use Flag for end users. I thought that is only present for people that have a license, so this is going to take a lot more effort to see how we will work this.

[Kamidi Saivinay]

Hi,

Could you please tell how you have enabled comments for selecting Helpful as No.

Thanks in advance,

Sai

sravani