Resolving tickets with the help of Knowledge articles using Smart IT

Knowledge articles are created to document information that can be referred when working on different tasks. These articles can provide information about known issues and their resolutions, configuration or set up information for common assets in the organization, or any information that requires to be shared in the organization.

If you have BMC Remedy Knowledge Management, Smart IT allows users to leverage the knowledge articles by displaying a list of related knowledge articles when creating or updating a ticket. Recommended Knowledge displayed for a ticket are the results based on search conducted on the basis of some key text in the ticket. However, Retired articles are not displayed under Recommended Knowledge. You can search for Retired articles only through the global search or advanced search using the Search for knowledge resources option.

It provides the ability to relate an existing Knowledge articles to a ticket so that users can view information that was useful when working on a request. Relating the knowledge resource to a ticket will update the usage % of the resource increasing its credibility and use for resolving a request. It will also increase the resource's relevance to similar type of requests, placing it higher in the list when displaying Recommended Knowledge for similar requests.

Using a knowledge article to resolve incidents

Jennie Tennyson, a Level 1 Service Agent, is working on an incident reported by Greg Johnson, the Director of HR, who got the Blue Screen of Death after rebooting his laptop.

Use case outline

Resolving an incident using an existing Knowledge article

1. Jennie is working on Greg's incident request related to the Blue Screen of Death displayed after he rebooted his laptop. Jennie opens the incident request, and views the list of resources displayed on the right pane of the Incident Request screen.
   
   These resources are searched for based on keywords identified by the system in the incident ticket. For the current incident, knowledge articles related to the blue screen of death are displayed. One of the knowledge articles is related to a security patch that was recently deployed to the type of laptop that Greg uses, and is known to cause blue screen issues.
2. She clicks on the Knowledge Article to preview its contents.
   The information provided can be used to resolve Greg's issue, so Jennie contacts Greg and provides him with the information provided in the Knowledge Article.
3. She clicks the Share  icon and emails the link to Greg, for his reference.
4. She wants to make sure that she is updated whenever the contents of the Knowledge Article are updated, so she clicks  to follow the article.

5. She saves the Knowledge Article to the ticket so that it is linked to the ticket and can be referred to when anyone looks at the ticket. She clicks the Save to Ticket option to save the Knowledge Article to the ticket so that it is listed under Saved Resources. Users can view the related Knowledge Article as a resource that was helpful in resolving the incident when they refer to this incident ticket.

   Note

   The  icon indicates that the resource has been saved to the ticket.

6. Upon further investigation, she realizes that in addition to the steps provided in the Knowledge Article, Greg needs to apply an additional fix to complete the process. The additional fix to be applied to resolve the issue completely is not included in the Knowledge Article, so Jennie opens the Knowledge Article, clicks the Activity tab on the right panel of the Knowledge Article, and types in a new post related to the additional step.
7. The Knowledge Article helped Jennie resolve the issue at hand, she clicks Yes to mark the Knowledge Article as a helpful resource This improves the rating of the Knowledge Article as a resource, and list it higher in the order when displayed as a Recommended Knowledge for similar issues.
8. She clicks the far left side of the screen to navigate back to the ticket.
9. She then marks the incident record as Resolved, provides the appropriate Resolution categorization and Product Resolution categorization and then closes the ticket.

Jennie notices that the reuse count of the article has incremented. When an article is related to an incident, and it is used to resolve that incident ticket, the reuse count of the article increments. The reuse count indicates usefulness of the article to resolve incident tickets. However, if the article is only related or pinned the to the incident without using it to resolve the incident, the reuse count of the article does not increment.

Jennie can also choose to create a new Knowledge Article to capture information she thinks may be useful to other service desk agents to resolve similar issues. 

To copy field information from Knowledge Article while resolving Incidents

While creating an Incident from Smart Recorder, if you open a Knowledge Article (KA), click Save and Resolve, the Operational Category and Product Category field information of the KA are copied to the Resolution Category and Resolution Product Category of the Incident ticket. Only the primary categories are copied. If the incident fields already have values, the following warning appears to confirm the copy action:

Click Yes to copy the information from the Knowledge Article.

If you have set a primary company in a knowledge article, then when you add Operational Category and Product Category of that company, they become primary by default. If you have not set a primary company and the categories as primary in the article, edit it, and manually update them to primary so that these categories are copied to the incident when you use the Save and Resolve functionality for the incident. For more information on how to set a company as primary, see Overview of knowledge articles.

Using knowledge articles to fulfill a work order

Steve, a field engineer, is working on a work order that includes setting up a projector for a conference room.

Use case outline

Fulfilling a work order using an existing Knowledge article

1. Steve is working on the work order related to setting up the projector in one of the conference rooms. Once he is inside the conference room, he opens the work order ticket from the Home screen.

2. He taps the Resources link to view the list of resources displayed on the left of the Work Order screen. These resources are searched for based on keywords identified by the system in the incident ticket. For the current work order, knowledge articles related to the projector are displayed. One of the knowledge articles provides instructions to set up the projector.

3. He clicks on the Knowledge Article to preview its contents, and notices that the projector version is not the same as the one he is setting up.

4. He notices that Rachel, another field technician, is online and available. He uses the Chat to reference the knowledge article in-line, and they clarify the steps needed for the different model.

5. Steve adds this additional information as a comment to the knowledge article.

6. He clicks the Share  icon and emails the link to Rachel for her reference.

7. He wants to make sure that he is updated whenever the contents of the Knowledge Article are updated, so he clicks  to follow the article.

8. The knowledge article helped Steve resolve the issue at hand, he clicks Yes to mark the Knowledge Article as a helpful resource This improves the rating of the Knowledge Article as a resource, and list it higher in the order when displayed as a Recommended Knowledge for similar issues.

9. He clicks the far left side of the screen to navigate back to the ticket.

10. Steve completes the activity with the projector and goes back to the work order, adds a work info and sets the status to complete.