Major issue management overview

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Major Issue Management Overview

    Major Issue Management in ServiceNow enables proactive communication and resolution for issues affecting a broad customer base. It helps you identify impacted customers, manage communications efficiently, and oversee the resolution process through a structured case management approach. This feature is essential for handling large-scale issues that require coordination across multiple customers.

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    Key Features

    • Major Case Concept: Centralizes issue details in a major case, with child cases created for each impacted customer containing their specific information.
    • Recipients List: Use the Targeted Communications application to identify and attach a list of impacted accounts or consumers to a major case. This list can be built dynamically, via scripts, or by importing customer data.
    • Case Creation and Promotion: Major cases can be created by customer service managers or promoted from candidate cases, which may originate from existing customer cases or be created directly for unreported issues. Candidate cases require approval before promotion.
    • Automatic Synchronization: Properties enable automatic syncing of updates from the major case to all associated child cases, ensuring consistent communication and status updates.
    • Interface Availability: The Major Issue Management menu is accessible in both the ServiceNow AI Platform and Agent Workspace interfaces, facilitating ease of use.

    Process for Identifying Issues and Managing Major Cases

    • Create a major case candidate or flag an existing case as a candidate for a major issue.
    • Review and approve or reject the candidate; approval promotes it to a major case and converts the candidate into a child case.
    • Associate other related customer cases as child cases under the major case.
    • Identify additional impacted customers by creating and attaching a recipients list to the major case, then generate child cases accordingly.
    • Manage the issue through the major case, with updates automatically reflected in child cases.
    • Close the major case upon resolution, which simultaneously closes all child cases.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    This functionality allows ServiceNow customers to efficiently handle widespread issues by streamlining communication and case management. It ensures impacted customers are proactively identified and informed, reducing duplicate case creation and improving resolution coordination. The automatic synchronization and structured case hierarchy simplify management and reporting, enhancing overall customer service effectiveness during major incidents.

    Major issue management enables customer communication for issues that impact a wider audience. Use this feature to proactively identify impacted customers, provide information to these customers, and manage the resolution process.

    This feature enables you to efficiently manage the communication and resolution process for issues that impact multiple customers. With major issue management, you can identify impacted customers who have not yet reported an issue and proactively create cases for these customers.

    Major issue management introduces the concept of a major case which contains the details about a particular issue. Child cases can easily be created for a major case, with one child case created for each customer affected by the issue. These child cases contain the customer-specific information.

    Identify affected customers by creating a recipients list of accounts or consumers and attaching it to the major case. Create this list using the Targeted Communications application. Build a recipients list by identifying dynamic conditions, running a script, or importing customer information into a template. Once attached to a major case, use the recipients list to create a child case for each customer included in the list.

    A major case is created in one of two ways:
    • A customer service manager can create a major case.
    • A customer service manager or major issue manager can promote a major case candidate.
    Major case candidates are created either by promoting an existing customer service case (for customer reported issues) or by creating a candidate case directly (for non-customer reported issues). Candidate cases require approval before being promoted to major cases.

    Major issue management also provides properties that enable automatic synchronization from a major case to the associated child cases. Use these properties to enable synchronization and to identify the synchronized fields.

    Major Issue Management menu can be used in the ServiceNow AI Platform interface and in the Agent Workspace interface.

    Identifying issues and creating major cases

    Customer service agents, managers, and major issue managers can use the following process to identify potential issues, create major cases, and identify impacted customers.
    1. Create a major case candidate or flag an existing customer service case as a major case candidate.
    2. Review the major case candidate and either approve it as a major case or reject it.
      • If approved, the candidate case becomes a child case of the major case.
      • If rejected, the candidate case returns to a normal case.
    3. Associate other cases reported for the same issue as child cases of the major case.
    4. Identify other customers impacted by the issue by creating a recipients list and attaching it to the major case.
    5. Create child cases for the customers included in the recipients list.
    6. Manage the issue to resolution using the major case.
      • Update the major case as needed, which automatically updates the child cases.
      • Close the major case when the issue is resolved. Closing the major case automatically closes all the child cases.