ServiceNow provides technical management support for IT industries that offers many business solutions to various organizations. It is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider in the IT sector. ServiceNow assists the organizations by maintaining the various workflows without any service-related issues with the customers.
Various services of ServiceNow include IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, IT Business Management, Software Asset Management, Security Operations, Governance, Risk and Compliance, HR Service Delivery, Customer Service Management. ServiceNow Ticketing Tool is adopted by several organizations to resolve their company-related issues followed by a well-framed management structure.
What is ServiceNow Ticketing Tool
The IT industry consumes a lot of time load, effort, and money in resolving the issues. The ServiceNow Ticketing Tool is an application that is introduced to prevent all those related issues which work in a well-organized stepwise process to resolve users' issues. The well-organized IT process management always implements a step-wise approach in their working environment and ServiceNow is not different from any of them.
The ServiceNow Ticketing Tool works in a 3-step process, in the first stage an issue is reported, secondly, it is managed in the best possible way, and finally, the issues are resolved with the capability of highly skilled professionals and an advanced computing system. This is the complete working structure of this ServiceNow Ticketing tool, and now, let us now go through the deep insights of working with ServiceNow Ticketing Tool.
ServiceNow Financial Benefits
ServiceNow provides the following financial benefits to an organization and the users as discussed below.
Reduce downtimes and associated operational costs:
Long downtimes will cost horribly and it doesn’t simply obstruct employee productivity. If an organization has an average of just 5-minute network downtime a month, then it approximately loses $300,000 on business disruptions a year. ServiceNow can restrain these losses. If an organization is having 2,000 employees with 10K yearly tickets in which a hundred tickets are of high priority, ServiceNow can annually save $208,000 solely by speeding up ticket resolution.
IT costs cutting:
The IT department of an organization having 2,000-employees can save even more due to an increase in productivity. They can compare the ticket types, prioritize them, adequately allocate required resources for their resolution, and have IT service provision under control. Moreover, ServiceNow will help them to automate numerous repetitive tasks, such as password resets and access rights requests. Concerning the ServiceNow value calculator, the result means saving not less than $450,000 a year. However, ServiceNow doesn’t exactly show how, so we don’t suggest expecting these figures, at least because it’s the result of implementing more advanced ServiceNow functionality than ticketing.
Increase user satisfaction:
Since the average ticket resolution times decreases considerably, user satisfaction rates are expected to rise proportionally. Well-organized ServiceNow processes will boost a change in your IT infrastructure towards providing user support to trigger positive feedback. The users will also find it helpful that ServiceNow keeps them informed about their tickets in many different ways.
Maintain visibility across IT operations:
ServiceNow lays a strong foundation for the IT department’s processes that would certainly lead to visibility across IT operations. It makes it easier for IT specialists to navigate in a clear and visible process hierarchy and train new members in the IT department.
Monitor and managing performance of the IT department:
ServiceNow provides visual and intuitive reporting functionality for measuring the performance of an IT unit. The operational analytics helps the IT service managers in identifying the areas of service provision problems and finding the methods to improve them. Moreover, the IT teams, such IT operations reports can be used on a higher administrative level to assess the performance of the entire organization more comprehensively.
Three working steps of ServiceNow Ticketing Tool
The working environment of ServiceNow Ticketing Tools follows the three steps process that implements a high-quality ticketing system which saves the time, money, and effort used on resolving reoccurring IT issues. A powerful IT service management framework is based on an ITIL service delivery model and it is the driver of ServiceNow’s ticketing tool system.
This system is divided into three central steps as reporting an issue, managing the issue, and resolving the issue. This Ticketing approach is a well-arranged system that provides a better user experience as well as responds quickly. You can get a detailed description of all its stages in the below-given points to understand it more deeply.
Step One: Reporting the issue
This is the first step, where an issue is reported in the system to carry it further to process them. Let's consider an example of a sample incident of a broken phone in an office and we must fix this using ServiceNow.
Now, to report this issue you have a few possible ways. Employees of different roles can report incidents in different ways as follows:
An IT staff member can create an incident right in ServiceNow if they catch that some phone doesn’t have a dial tone.
A user can do this in many ways by using an email or through a phone call by using another working phone, and a web form on the organization’s Service Portal.
A third-party phone supplier/partner can also report the incidents if arranged so. For instance, if they point to the tendency of a certain phone model to lose dial tone, they can report this in the same ways as a user.
ServiceNow can also create incidents automatically. For instance, through a regular automated analysis of phone system logs: if ServiceNow detects any malfunctions, then it triggers the creation of an incident.
Step Two: Managing the issue
Once the issue-reporting is done then reaches this second phase termed as “Managing” This process involves the following three steps.
Assessment: When the incident is created in ServiceNow, admins analyze its impact and its urgency. Based on these two criteria, ServiceNow prioritizes the incident automatically which means to say that the SLA-based resolution countdown clock starts ticking.
Assignment: Using the incident description, ServiceNow automatically assigns the incident to an IT specialist who has the relevant expertise to resolve it. Then, the platform notifies the assignee through an email. IT employees can also assign the incidents manually but automated assignment makes them focus on the more difficult tasks.
Investigation: The assignee analyzes the incident and tries to find a way to restore the undisturbed flow of everyday business processes.
In an example of a user whose phone has stopped working, they can always monitor the incident management process. The ServiceNow notifies them of any important support activities. On the other hand, if the phone starts working again with no IT assistance required then the user can cancel the incident which saves time for IT support.
Step Three: Resolving the issue
The ServiceNow ticketing system will not let the technical team hit the “Resolve” button immediately to put an end. The ticketing system makes the technicians specify a particular type of resolution which is used regarding who resolved it and when. Such details have to be provided in the incident record like permanently solved, solved through a workaround, not solved, etc. If the incident is resolved, the associated user needs to close it. In case if they don’t, ServiceNow does it automatically within a set period.
When the incident is not resolved, then the escalation rules will come into action. As time passes, the system applies the measurements of inactivity monitors and reminds the supporting team to take new incident resolution actions. If in case the incident is very close to breaching its related SLA, ServiceNow can escalate its priority. This helps IT teams to stay within allowed resolution times and provide a high-quality service.
Types of Tickets in ServiceNow
To get rid of issues, the users primarily must comprehend them more deeply and differentiate them as per their categories to work more efficiently on it. This is a bit logical and needs to be taken care of while detecting any issue. For any best practices of IT, organizing incidents by type is the key factor. ServiceNow will categorize those issues by the following types:
Incident Management: These tickets are an unplanned interruption to an IT service or a reduction in the quality of an IT service.
Problem Management: These tickets focus on finding the root cause of an issue. This is usually sent to a team for severe malfunctions to resolve with a long-term fix.
Request Management: These tickets are usually implemented for smaller requests when users/employees need support from IT.
Change Management: These tickets are categorized for drastic changes made to your IT environment, like integrations or replacing a legacy system.
Primarily, it is a bit difficult for individuals to differentiate between a problem and an incident. 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 occurring events. If the ticketing system is unable to differentiate between an Incident and a Problem, it becomes a serious threat to the organizations’ IT operations. If in case the system ignores the root cause of similar incidents, and they keep coming, again and again, it can simply affect the efficiency of the IT services.
Incident Management using ServiceNow
The number of tickets increases exponentially while working in huge organizations. The concerned people of the corresponding department have to take the whole responsibility of handling all of them. The lifecycle of an incident can be seen as shown below:
New Incident -> Assignment -> Work in Progress -> Pending -> Resolved/Closed/Cancelled
To manage an incident ticket under the ServiceNow Ticketing System, the concerned team members has to go through the following steps as discussed below:
Creating a new incident ticket:
To create a new Incident ticket, apply the following steps:
Select the ‘Incident’ module on the left sidebar and then 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 ticket into the “assigned” state:
Apply the following steps to move the ticket into the assigned state.
Select the right “Assignment Group” and “Assigned to” precisely.
Fill up all the required information.
Click on “Save and Exit” or “Save”.
Note: You are always allowed to change the incident state that is to be assigned.
Moving ticket into the “work in progress” state:
Apply the following steps to move the ticket into the work in progress state.
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 ticket into the “pending” state:
To do this, the Incident state must be changed to “Pending” and the comment section must be updated by specifying the reason for pending.
Moving ticket into the “resolved” state:
Apply the following steps to move the ticket into the resolved state.
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 ticket into the “closed” state:
This is an automated process, in which resolved tickets move to the closed state after 24 hours.
Moving ticket into the “canceled” state:
To do this, change the Incident State to ‘Cancelled’ and then just click “Save and Exit”.
Conclusion
ServiceNow has proved to solve many business problems since 2003. By defining, structuring, and automating the workflows, the ServiceNow Incident management system has provided the best-streamlined services to the enterprise.
The most beneficial aspect of the ServiceNow Ticketing tool is that it relatively consumes a low amount of configuration required to get the platform up and running in an enterprise. This obliterates the time from being superfluous and allows the user to move right into identifying concerns and resolving them.
