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On-Call schedule with a rotating cell phone

MarkT2445801916
Tera Contributor

2 hours ago

I have a team who uses a rotating phone 24*7 so I created a user named on-call 1 and added the number. However, in order to see the user in experts on-call the user on-call 1 must be in the support group.  This creates a problem as on-call 1 shows up to get tickets assigned.  I cannot believe its this complicated to simply add a fixed on-call # to a user just for the purpose of the number being visible for off hours escalation in Agent workspace.  HELP! 

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Vikram Reddy
Tera Guru

16m ago

Hi @MarkT2445801916,

 

If you're on the standard On-Call Scheduling module (Schedule > On-Call Schedules) feeding the Experts on Call panel in Agent Workspace / Service Operations Workspace, and "on-call 1" is a placeholder account you created just to carry a rotating number. If that's the setup, here's the part that's fixed and the part that isn't.

The fixed part: On-Call Scheduling builds its roster from the members of the group the schedule is attached to, so yes, the account has to sit in sys_user_grmember for that group before it'll ever show up in Experts on Call. That's how the roster/panel is designed to work, there's no "on-call only" membership type that skips the real group.

The part that isn't fixed: the on-call schedule itself doesn't assign anything. It's read-only, contact info for the panel. Whatever is actually routing tickets to on-call 1 is a separate mechanism, and that's where you fix this. A few things to check:

  1. Manual assignment: if agents are just picking on-call 1 out of the Assigned to picker because it lists every active group member, tighten that field's reference qualifier (role, a custom "assignable" flag, whatever your instance uses) so a placeholder account doesn't appear as a candidate.
  2. Round robin or load balancing: ServiceNow doesn't ship this out of the box for Incident, it's almost always a custom Business Rule or Script Include querying the group. Add a checkbox, either on the user record or on the sys_user_grmember record itself, and filter it out of the query that builds the candidate list.
  3. Advanced Work Assignment: if AWA is driving assignment, set on-call 1 permanently unavailable in Agent Availability. AWA won't route work to an agent flagged unavailable, but that status has no bearing on whether the on-call schedule shows their number.

A cleaner long-term pattern some teams use instead: stand up a second, escalation-only group that on-call 1 belongs to, and point the Experts on Call configuration at that group rather than at your real working assignment group. Keeps the actual support group's membership clean and avoids touching assignment logic at all.

Which of those three is actually pushing tickets to on-call 1 in your instance, manual pick, round robin script, or AWA? That changes which fix applies.

Happy to dig into the specifics if you can share which one it is.

References

 

Thank you,
Vikram Karety
Octigo Solutions INC
My Blog: glideandgen.com

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