Please check this section in order to understand what kind of important edge cases in ServiceNow might impact your work if you ignore them:
Some users might not prefer keeping the communication in ServiceNow ticket activity section and rather send you emails or Teams messages instead. In that case, please explain the colleague that we need to keep the communication in the ServiceNow ticket and ask them to make the same response in the Activity section.
In case a colleague reaches out without raising a ServiceNow ticket, please raise a new ServiceNow ticket on their behalf, define the Requester as the colleague whom contacted you and reply back to the colleague by providing the ServiceNow ticket number with the redirection link, and explain that we need to receive each request as ServiceNow tickets in order to track our volume and performance.
When forwarding a ServiceNow ticket, you need to delete the Assigned to field and then the Assignment group field, in order to assign a new assignment group.
When a ServiceNow ticket is in Pending User Info status awaiting response, the ticket will update as Active, only if the defined requester replies back with a comment.
Sometimes another colleague replies on behalf of the requester without updating the incident state as Active, which might cause a misconception that the ticket is still awaiting response from the requester. Only uploading a file does not count as a response as well, and the comments of any other user would not update the incident state as Active, posing a risk of being resolved automatically while actually there is a comment. For this reason, the assignee must track the activity section and turn on email notifications in case of such an occasion might happen.
When you respond to a ticket and set the incident state as Pending User Info, only the user defined as Requester is going to receive the notification email. If you need to ask a question to another colleague, please update the Requester as that person, and then update the ticket as Pending User Info. Please remember to update the requester field to the original user so that the user can continue tracking their case.
Even though general work in ServiceNow is operated via ServiceNow tickets (SNTs), there is another module with a similar purpose that is called as Customer Software Tickets (CST). Unfortunately, SNTs cannot be forwarded to CSTs and some teams only work on CST module. In that case, the SNT needs to be resolved and a separate CST needs to be created.
It is against the SLA metrics to create a ServiceNow ticket and assign to a colleague at the same time, while creating it. If a ticket is created that way, the system won’t count this assignment as a response, and the incident state is going to stay at New status. This is not acceptable as the ticket would eventually breach the Response SLA. For this reason, it is important to keep track of assigned tickets in the dashboard to check and fix any assigned ServiceNow ticket.
A resolved ServiceNow ticket can be commented on or reopened for 5 days until it is permanently closed. Once the incident state is Closed, it cannot be modified or reopened. However, the requester or any other user might post a comment in the Activity section without reopening the ticket. This may result in an overlooked comment causing an escalation or a negative feedback. For this reason, please take extra attention to ServiceNow notification emails in order to catch such cases and respond back to the user.