This documentation supports the 21.3 version of BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management.To view an earlier version, select the version from the Product version menu.

Resolving tickets with the help of Knowledge articles

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 Helix ITSM: 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.

Related topics

Getting-started



Scenario for resolving tickets with the help of Knowledge articles

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.


Workflow for resolving tickets with the help of Knowledge articles

The following image represents the workflow for resolving an incident with the help of knowledge articles:

KnowledgeUseCase1.png

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_share.gif 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 icon_follow.gif 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_pinnedResource.gif 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. 


Benefits of resolving tickets with the help of Knowledge articles

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.

 

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