Resolving tickets with the help of knowledge articles

Scenario to resolve incidents by using a knowledge article

Workflow

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

Resolving an incident using an existing knowledge article

1. The service agent 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. The service agent clicks on the knowledge article to preview its contents.
   The information provided can be used to resolve Greg's issue, so the service agent contacts Greg and provides him with the information provided in the knowledge article.
3. The service agent clicks the Share icon and emails the link to Greg, for his reference.
4. The service agent 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. The service agent 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.

   The 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 filter knowledge articles

While working on an incident, problem investigation, work order or known error ticket, the ticket assignee pins the knowledge articles that were found useful for resolving the ticket. Other agents can view the pinned knowledge articles to understand how a ticket was resolved by the assignee.

Use the appropriate filter in the Recommended knowledge section under the Resources tab based on your requirement:

The filter also appears in the BMC Helix ITSM ticket preview.

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 Operational Category and 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, 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 about how to set a company as primary, see Overview of knowledge articles.

To fulfill a work order by using knowledge articles

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

Workflow

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. Steve taps the Resources link to view the list of resources displayed on the left of the Work Order screen. These resources are searched based on the 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. Steve 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. Steve 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. Steve clicks the Share  and emails the link to Rachel for her reference.
7. Steve 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 click 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. Steve 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.

Benefits of resolving tickets with the help of knowledge articles

BMC Helix ITSM provides the ability to relate to 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 percent 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.

To resolve tickets in BMC Helix ITSM

In BMC Helix ITSM, you resolve tickets by using knowledge articles, by taking direct actions on assets, or by collaborating with other agents.

You leverage knowledge articles for resolving tickets in BMC Helix ITSM. When BMC Helix ITSM is integrated with BMC Client Management (BCM), in BMC Helix ITSM you view data about BCM-managed assets in real time, and take direct actions on those assets to resolve tickets. You can also work collaboratively with other agents to resolve tickets by using Openfire chat.

To chat with other agents to resolve a ticket using Openfire

Openfire is an open source real-time collaboration server based on the XMPP (Jabber) protocol used for instant messaging, and group chat. You can leave chat anytime as per your requirement, add participant for a group chat, and minimize the chat window. You can also type certain keywords to get the ticket related details in your chat window. 

Click the following video to view how to use chat feature. The screen in this video refers to an earlier version, but the functionality that are explained in this video are still relevant for the current release. 

https://youtu.be/uEg9U_PtZkw

Before you begin

The administrator must enable the Openfire Chat option while installing BMC Helix ITSM application.

To get resources in chat window to resolve an incident ticket

You can type certain keywords followed by / in the chat to get the ticket related details in the Openfire chat window. The currently supported keywords are listed below in the table. To understand the use of these keywords through an example, see Example of chatting with other agents to resolve a ticket section in this topic.

The following screenshot displays the supported keywords:

Example of using chat window to get resources to resolve an incident ticket

Allen, an incident owner with the summary as VPN issues. He selects Share > Chat on this incident.

If Allen has opened the incident in the Progressive Web App UI, he clicks the chat icon as shown in the following screenshot:

In the chat window, he types /details, and hits Enter.

The following details are displayed in the chat window:

Now, he types /knowledge to get the related knowledge articles, and hits Enter. The following knowledge articles are displayed in the chat window:

To get the similar incidents, he types /similarincidents, and hits Enter. The following incidents are displayed in the chat window:

To create a related knowledge article

In addition to creating related items, you can also create related knowledge articles. You can create related knowledge articles from incidents, work orders, problem investigations, and known errors. In the related article, important information is pre-populated in the article content and metadata.

1. Use one of the following methods to navigate to the option to create a related knowledge article.
   • On the Resources tab of the ticket, under Recommended Knowledge, click Search for knowledge resources and then click Create a new article. 
   • Open the ticket, and click the Related Items tab. Click +Create related > Knowledge article.
2. On the Create Knowledge page, select an article template.
3. After you preview the selected template, click Use selected Template.
4. Review the information that is pre-populated into the article, and add more content as required.
5. Click Submit Changes.

When the article is created, it is pinned to that ticket in the Resources tab under Recommended Knowledge. The article is not listed in the Related items tab of the ticket.

Information copied to a related knowledge article

When you create a related knowledge article, the following information is copied from tickets to knowledge article:

The following default values are prepopulated in the knowledge article:

• Author: Logged in user (assuming correct permissions and functional roles)
• Language: Language of the logged in user