Using Incident Templates with Attached Knowledge

[Janelle3]

Hi,

Following on the the KMUG in April about metrics I have been investigating our very low attach rate for knowledge base articles on incidents.

We found that analysts are often sharing links from the 'Customer Comments' or Email functions of ServiceNow, without using the "Attach" button. Because they didn't click attach, this isn't counted as an "attach" and it doesn't attached the knowledge article to the record under 'Related Records', or appear in the attached knowledge related list when I search.

Whilst trying to encourage use of the "Attach" feature, I've found that some teams have got incident templates set up with a link to a knowledge article defined in the customer comments. The template also defaults many of the other fields required so it helps make the analyst's process much more efficient. 

The way these teams are using Incident templates provides a better customer experience AND encourages use of the knowledge base, so I'm not going to discourage their use just to improve our "attach" statistics. But is there a way to get the best of both worlds and define the template to attach the knowledge article? Whilst you can link Related Records as part of a template (such as a Change Request), there doesn't seem to be a way to attach a knowledge article.

Cheers,

Janelle

[bammar]

Hi Janelle a few comments here.

If I do 100 password resets a day, very cut and dry and there is a KB regarding a standard pw reset- is this something that needs to be attached 100 times?

I know the most important use case to attaching a KB is when you are sending the customer steps from a KB they can see and follow- and other times an agent can attach an internal KB article that helped them to resolve an issue as part of their own documentation.

But if i am doing mundane repetitive pw reset and i memorized the process 4 years ago it is an excercise with hardly any utility to keep attaching the KB because in reality i didnt use it.  I am not sure if there is any actionable results to knowing the attach rate. I think the organic and natural percentage speaks  volume and increasing it by a mandate would sort of give you a false impression of how much it is being used. 

More important indicators is the helpul yes/no - then you can see that an agent or customer needed help and the article was effective or not. 

The most important thing is customers are assisted and provided with info whether in the incident notes/emails/ kb references. The other important thing is the ticket be documented and classified effectively for reporting. 

I hope someone actually answers your question even more effectively and more directly than me as i sort of deflected but i hope my feedback is valuable in that you may be just fine as it stands now. 

[Janelle3]

Thank you for your answer Bammar, it's actually a very practical way of looking at things and I think a lot of Service Desk analysts would agree with you. If it's for a task they do 20 times a day they don't want to have to refer to the knowledge base as it's only going to slow them down. And I don't like asking people to do things only for our tracking and statistics purposes, we want there to be a real customer benefit too.

I'd be interested to know from a KCS-expert what their opinion is on this because the way I understand it, KCS expects some use of the knowledge base every time we respond to an incident - either "Use it, Flag it, Fix it or Add it.” If analysts are not referring to the knowledge base because they "know" the steps, they are not validating the content of the article. It's also useful for statistical purposes e.g. if a particular workaround or procedure had to be used 100 times a day, it helps identify it as a candidate for automation. There are certainly some benefits to knowing the attach rate, but are they enough to justify the extra time spent by the analyst? This is where my Service Desk's template approach is great, because they can set up a template that makes it take zero extra time/effort to include a reference to a knowledge articles in the work notes or customer comments. It's just unfortunate that this doesn't count as an "attach" because it's just the permalink to the article.

As you mentioned, sending articles to customers is our most important use case, and for that I would certainly like to know how many times an article has been attached. With just URLs being sent to customers through customer comments/emails, I can't track that unfortunately. We can track views, but it's not quite the same.

Thank you for your insightful response - always good to have a reality check and consider things from the Service Desk perspective.

Cheers,

Janelle

[Julie21]

Hi Janelle. Did you ever find a solution to this? I'm also looking for a way to attach a knowledge article to an incident via a template.