This article mainly represents ServiceNow Ticketing Tool, which helps to resolve company issues. ServiceNow is a US-based cloud computing company that focuses on providing technical management support to IT companies. As its name represents, ServiceNow offers many problem-solving services for different organizations and is a software-as-a-service provider in the IT sector.
In this blog, we will discuss the following topics
- What is ServiceNow Ticketing Tool?
- How does the ServiceNow ticketing tool work?
- Major Issues in ServiceNow ticketing
- Type of tickets in ServiceNow
- How to manage incident tickets in ServiceNow?
What is ServiceNow Ticketing Tool?
Solving an issue can cost you loads of time, effort, and money in the IT sector. To prevent all of them, ServiceNow has introduced its Ticketing Tool. Resolving issues in IT is not a piece of cake and can cause a disturbance in everyday IT processes. ServiceNow Ticketing Tool works in a well-organized stepwise process to resolve users’ issues.
Each and every well-organized IT process works in a stage-wise manner and ServiceNow is not different from any of them. The ServiceNow Ticketing Tool works in a 3-step process, in which, firstly an issue is reported, then its managed in the best possible way. In the final step, it gets resolved with the mental capability of highly skilled professionals and advanced computing systems. This is the complete working structure of this tool, and now, let us get some deep knowledge about it in the below-given points.
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How does the ServiceNow ticketing tool work?
As we have already mentioned above, ServiceNow Ticketing Tool works in a three-step process. Its well-arranged manner of working provides a better user experience as well as quicker responses. You can get a detailed description of all its stages in the below-given points to understand it more deeply. For making it a bit easy, let’s take an example of a broken phone in your office and its lifecycle with ServiceNow. Kindly take a look at these points shown below:
Reporting an issue
It is the first step in this process, in which an issue gets reported in the system for further process. Now according to the example, you have a broken phone in your office and you have to fix this up via ServiceNow. Now, to report this issue you have a total number of 4 ways, which can be seen via the following points:
- Via creating an incident directly in ServiceNow.
- Via sending an email to the company’s official id (i.e. [email protected]).
- Via reaching out to the Service Desk directly by a phone call or walk-in.
- Via the creation of a new incident by reaching out to the service portal or service catalog at the ServiceNow homepage.
- Automatically, via regular automated analysis of phone system logs.
- Via ServiceNow directly if any malfunctioning is created.
Apart from this, that issue can also be reported by a partner, but only if the facility is arranged by the company.
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Managing an issue
After reporting the issue, it goes to the second phase termed as ‘Managing’. This process has three steps. You can check them out in the below-mentioned points:
- Assessment: Under this, admins analyze the urgency and impact of the issue, after which, the system automatically sets its priority level.
- Assignment: After the assessment, the reported incident goes to the highly skilled technical specialists via email. These specialists take the bridle from here.
- Handling: The support team then performs necessary operations for the restoration of the usual workflow back again.
Furthermore, ServiceNow also provides you a facility to track the status of the Service Desk’s activities for our issue. Apart from this, if any miracle happens and your phone starts automatically without any assistance from the Service Desk, you can easily cancel the reported incident.
Resolving an issue
Now, this is a really interesting part as ServiceNow doesn’t allow the tech team to just hit the ‘Resolve’ button and close the case. The tech team will need to fill up a form, or we can say input resolution information. For this, they will have to state many important things including, who resolved it, when it got resolved, and a resolution (i.e. not solved, permanently solved, solve through a workaround, etc).
If the issue gets completely resolved, then you will be asked to shut it down, and if you don’t respond, the team will do it automatically after a fixed period of time. Unfortunately, if the problem doesn’t get resolved, escalation rules take the charge. According to these rules, the system notifies the inactivity team regarding this issue within a particular solving process. Inactivity monitors then examine every step taken to solve the incident very closely and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) track the time spent on the incident. This entire process has been developed just to offer you high-quality service.
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Major Issues in ServiceNow ticketing
ServiceNow is undeniably a great IT Management Platform and has given a spectacular Ticketing Tool to the world. With the reference of time, the company has evolved all of their tools in a very smart manner to be the Greek gods in their niches. However, the users have faced some issues while using ServiceNow Ticketing. The company must have taken appropriate actions on them, but getting them through can make you aware of the possible problems while using it. Kindly take a look at the below-given points
- Accounting for time off (i.e. vacation, off-duty, etc) as well as for the time of resolving an issue.
- Less interactive User Interface.
- Limitations in reporting functionalities, as it is a bit complex to create reports in it.
- Unannounced changes in UI/UX create confusion.
- Immature searchability.
- Not able to perform smoothly if having multiple owners.
These are some issues faced by the users of the ServiceNow Ticketing Tool till now. However, these are the researched issues and must have been taken care of by the company itself.
Type of tickets in ServiceNow
To get rid of issues, the users initially need to understand them more deeply and differentiate them as per their categories to work upon them more efficiently. It is a bit logical and needs to be taken care of while detecting any issue. For example, if we use ‘Food’ to refer to everything we eat, it will undoubtedly become a bit confusing to detect what we mean by it as there are, bread, noodles, pasta, chicken, mutton, and many other food items. They are all different from each other and we make them in different ways. The same goes with the problems, and the ServiceNow team has differentiated them into 4 categories. Kindly check them out in the following points given below:
Incident Management:
These tickets are used for unplanned and sudden interruptions in an IT service delivery.
Problem Management:
These tickets are used for the root cause of a number of incidents. Problem Management focuses on the main reason or problem behind many similar incidents. For example a server issue.
Request Management:
These tickets are used for smaller requests when you need something from IT support.
Change Management:
As its name suggests, these tickets are used if you want to make any change in your IT environment. In simple words, you can use these tickets if you want to add, remove, or modify anything under the hood of your IT services. For eg: replacing a legacy system.
Initially, it is a bit difficult for everyone to differentiate between a problem and an incident. Let’s get it more clear, Incident Management is entirely focused on resolving a specific issue and restoring the usual flow of business as quickly as possible. Whereas, Problem Management revolves around finding the root cause of similar incidents and resolving them to prevent future mishappening.
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So, if your ticketing system is not able to differentiate between an Incident and a Problem, it is a serious threat for all of your company’s IT operations. If a system ignores the root cause of similar incidents, and they keep coming, again and again, it can simply affect the efficiency of your IT services.
We can understand this more clearly with the help of a general life example. If a person has terrible health issues, then the support of some random medicines will not help for a long time. The issues will arise again after passing out the effect of medicines. In order to make him/her completely alright, a specialist doctor will need to examine him/her deeply so that the main problem (like weak eyesight for headache, Typhoid for continuous loose motions, etc.) can be resolved. Here, ServiceNow works as a Doctor to cure out the main problem in your working process in Problem Management.
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How to manage incident tickets in ServiceNow?
If you’re working for a big organization, then the number of tickets can eventually face an exponential increment. In this case, you will have to take the responsibility of handling all of them. The lifecycle of an incident can be seen below:
New Incident > Assignment > Work in Progress > Pending > Resolved/Closed/Cancelle
Here, we are guiding you on how to manage the ticket in ServiceNow during its entire lifecycle. To manage an incident ticket under the ServiceNow Ticketing System, you can simply go through the following points shown below:
Creating a new Incident Ticket:
To create a new Incident ticket, you can simply follow the below-mentioned points to get through the entire process without any hustle:
- Select the ‘Incident’ module on the left sidebar and click ‘Create New’.
- Fill all the columns appropriately. (Note: Mandatory columns are showcased as a red box).
- Click the ‘Save and Exit’ or ‘Save’ button located at the header bar and below the vendor ticketing fields.
Moving the Ticket in ‘Assigned’ State:
To get this process done, kindly take a look at the following points:
- Select the right ‘Assignment Group’ and ‘Assigned to’ precisely.
- Fill up all the required information.
- Click ‘Save and Exit’ or ‘Save’
Note: You are always allowed to change the incident state that is to be assigned.
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Moving the Ticket into ‘Work in Progress State:
To make this task done, you can apply these below-mentioned points:
- Simply change the Incident State to the ‘Work in Progress’ state.
- Click ‘Save and Exit’ or ‘Save’.
- Record tasks performed in the ‘Additional Comments’ section till the incident remains in this state.
Moving a Ticket into ‘Pending’ State:
For this, you just need to change the Incident state to ‘Pending’ and update the comment section with the reason for pending.
Moving a Ticket into ‘Resolved’ State:
In this section, you will have to follow the given instructions:
- Change the Incident State to ‘Resolved’.
- Enter the necessary and appropriate information in the ‘Resolution Notes’ and ‘Resolution Code’ sections.
- Click ‘Save and Exit’.
Moving a Ticket into ‘Closed’ State:
This is an automated process, in which resolved tickets move to the closed state after 24 hours.
Moving a Ticket into ‘Cancelled’ state:
For this, you will have to change the Incident State to ‘Cancelled’ and then just click ‘Save and Exit’.
In this way, an Incident Ticket can be managed in the ServiceNow Ticketing System. Apart from this, you also get many additional options such as attaching configuration items, watch lists, etc. These additional facilities to help in managing incident tickets can simply be seen in the help manual offered by ServiceNow.
Here we have showcased all the essential information related to ServiceNow Technology and its Ticketing system. You can easily get through it to understand it more deeply before heading on with it.
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