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Incidents may be created by internal customers through the web portal or via email, or by a technician taking a telephone call from a customer. They may also be created by network monitoring systems configured to send problem reports to the system through one of the standard APIs. A field in the Incident form specifies the reporting source (, such as email, web, or phone, etc.). A technician may also convert a Service Request to a new Incident via an action button in the SR form if a customer submitted a Service Request when he they should really have submitted an Incident. See Details of Incident Rules in the Appendix for more details.
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When a customer submits an Incident, the contact fields automatically populate based on the details in his/her the User record. In the default setup, an Incident cannot be submitted on behalf of a user who has no user record in the system. This may easily be changed by modifying the linked fields from the User table to enable "non-source" values to be used.
The user customer selects a category for the Incident from the drop down list "I'm having a problem with...", such as 'Email' or 'Access Problem', then describes his/her the problem in more detail via the Summary and Description fields.
The user customer is also given two fields to describe the priority of the Incident: Impact and Urgency. Impact specifies how widespread the Incident is: A user whose desktop computer is malfunctioning would choose 'Affects Single User', whereas a critical server failure might be classified as 'Affects Company'. Urgency is a subjective measure of the criticality and time sensitivity of the Incident, and ranges from Low to Critical. Both Impact and Urgency are used to automatically determine the official Priority of the Incident, a field which is hidden from the end user and only editable by staff. See Incident Rules for the current logic used to set the Priority. ( Priority is only set by a rule if the staff user has not already manually set it).
After providing the summary, description, category, impact, and urgency, the user clicks Finish and receives an automatic email notification when the system creates the record.
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New Incidents are created in a status of Open by default. During creation, a technician may change the status to Assigned (if he wishes to indicate work has they have already started working on it) , or Closed ( if he was they are able to resolve the issue over the phone and wants to capture the request for reporting purposes).
Automatic Emails Sent upon Submission
If a Support Staff technician creates a record in a status of Closed an email is sent to the customer telling him/her how to reopen the Incident. This email is sent by a workflow action and is displayed as a checkbox that can be turned off by technician users. ( This option is set in the workflow options).
If the status is not Closed when saved, the rule named "Incident - All Creation Actions" will send the customer an acknowledgement email and will also send an email to either the Assigned Person, if there is one, or to the Assigned Team if not.
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When the technician has completed work on the Incident, he/she sets they set the Status field to Closed and puts the solution notes into the Resolution field. This triggers a workflow email to the customer that includes the content of the Resolution fields and tells the customer that the request has been completed.
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Technician users may easily report the time they spend on handling Incidents. There are two fields and an action button for this purpose (Time purpose–Time Spent, Time Description, and Add Time) on Time–on the Working Notes tab of the layout. Entering values there will automatically create a new time entry record when the Add Time button is clicked. The time entry will show the work done by the technician and the current date.
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All the time entries for a request can be seen on the Time tab as well. If a technician needs to report time that was spent on a different day or by a different user, he they may click the New button on the Time spent table to submit a time entry directly and change the date or "Done by" field. All time entered is totaled in the All Time Spent field, which can be used in reporting or billing.
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If the customer updates the Incident at any point, an email notifies the assigned person, or assigned team ( if no assigned person) , of the update.
When the customer replies to the email or edits an Incident in a status of Pending Customer, the status changes to Updated by Customer (Rule: Incident Customer Update Actions, Action: Submitter Update Actions) and an email notifies the assigned person, or the assigned team ( if assigned person is empty) , that the customer has replied. The customer is able to update the Additional Information field directly and any email reply from the customer is mapped to that same field.
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