How to TEXT a user when an Incident SLA escalates to CRITICAL.

[MH_Vent]

I have scanned through hundreds of results but haven't found an answer to this yet. The Community Search isn't very good, in my opinion. If you have *current* knowledge of this, please let me know. Thanks in advance! Note: We are currently using VANCOUVER.

The CEO of my company wants to get a text message notification from ServiceNow, sent to himself and a few others in Senior Management, when an Incident escalates to a status of Critical. 

I already know how to set up Text Notifications and those work, BUT Senior Management does not want text notifications of everything. They only want them when an Incident escalates to Critical. Is there a way to do this in ServiceNow? Preferably a Best Practices method that doesn't include creating separate accounts for all the members of Senior Management? If not, what do you recommend? We also have Microsoft Teams, but currently it's not connected with our ServiceNow instances.

#vancouver

[bsanchez024]

For this, we used the workflow editor and created a flow to be triggered when certain conditions were met. Once the conditions were met, the SMS notification could be sent to a specific group or individual. 

[MH_Vent]

Hello and thanks for your response. We have a lot of workflows as well. Did you hardcode the user's SMS addresses (PhoneNumber@smsProvider) into the workflow? That's the sticking point for us. We want users to continue receiving regular email notifications, but only SMS texts when an Incident escalates to Critical. They don't want SMS texts coming to their phones for anything else.

[Tony Chatfield1]

Hi, if you are not creating sys_user accounts in your instance for your management team members?
Then you would still be able to utilize an email to sms gateway as these normally use <phonenumber>@<gateway> formatted email addresses to identify recipients, then when the gateway receives the message it is converted to sms and it is sent to the numbers involved.
Meaning that you can configure a specific email notification on incident table with trigger conditions of where your escalation field (or combination of fields) changes to meet the 'Critical' value.
Create an email notification (servicenow.com)

This can add a little more end to end processing time, but as long as you are using a reasonable gateway provider, should be just as reliable as any other communication form.

[MH_Vent]

Hi Tony,

What I meant when I said that we don't want to create "separate" SN accounts is, put another way, that we don't want to create additional accounts to the ones that already exist. We only want one SN account per user. I added that as part of my question because it had already been suggested to me that we could create a 2nd account for each person who needs to receive texts using the PhoneNumber@ServiceProvider formatted email addresses only in the event of one particular type of notification.

I'm already aware of Email Notifications, and I've set a few up, but to make it work, I had to have the PhoneNumber@ServiceProvider as the user's primary email address or in the CC field of their SN profile. My problem with that is that the user will now be getting texts for every notification, which we don't want. Our Senior Mgmt wants to continue receiving only standard emails for all the usual SN notifications except when an Incident has escalated to Critical; Then they want a text for that, and only for that. It's okay if they also get the standard email notification for a Critical escalation too, but they also want a text. Their theory being that a text is harder to ignore than an email. 

What I'm wondering is what is the method of using that PhoneNumber@ServiceProvider text only in the event of an INC status changing to Critical while the user continues to get emails (and not texts) for all the standard notifications they're already getting.

My apologies if I have over-explained this.