I'm working on a project that involves the documentation of PRBs (or problems, bugs, defects... whatever you call them in your organization) in the knowledge base. We call these documents "known errors." For a while now we've been publishing our known errors publicly for the customers to see. As we make adjustments to the process and look for buy-in from some teams we haven't worked with before, we're being asked to provide justification. That is, the leadership staff is saying, "What does this do for me, the customer, or the company?"
It's an interesting question and one that Kylin Follenweider and Britt Champeau have been an integral part of helping me answer. We could show views, but is that really proving value? What about incident volume? Does having a known error article actually reduce incident volume? Or is the real value in how quickly we're able to assist customers?
We don't have all of the answers yet. We have the data, but we need more than the data points to understand the patterns. Some conversations with customers are in order... That said, there's one data point that is allowing me to have some of those conversations right away.
This report is showing the time to relief (the point the customer has a solution suggested to them) for one of our features. It's striking how much quicker we're able to provide relief to a customer when a known error is published. Why does that matter? Customer satisfaction and cost savings. Customers get answers more quickly which makes them more satisfied with their experience with ServiceNow. It saves the organization money if we're able to provide relief quickly.
So, when I'm going into my conversations to help justify publishing known errors, I'm talking about customers and cost reduction while showing them real data about how impactful the known errors really are.
Let met know what you're doing in your organization and, as always, feel free to ask questions.
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