Smart Recorder overview

The Smart Recorder provided with BMC Helix ITSM reduces the amount of time that it takes to register and resolve incidents and work orders, increasing call center productivity and improving customer satisfaction.

The Smart Recorder employs a free form text entry field that frees you from having to serve the needs of a structured form and helps you to focus instead on what the customer is saying. This method of creating tickets enables service desk agents to capture information in real time, directly from the customer, and in their own words. As the service desk agent enters the details about the issue from the customer, the system becomes aware of those details and starts to run background full text searches against people information and asset records to help identify the customer's organization, location, assigned assets, and so on. The results of those searches are presented on-screen as suggested matches. When there is a match, the service desk agent can associate that information to the incident or work order with a single click.

How the Smart Recorder search works

When using the Smart Recorder to create a record, it displays related knowledge articles, tickets, and templates. This topic provides details about how the search decides which records to display based on their relevancy. Smart Recorder search does not support Rich Text Format (RTF) text entry.

The Smart Recorder search result is displayed based on the permissions the selected customer has.

Tip

In Firefox, after you select a user, you might not be able to clear the selected user by using the Backspace key. Click the selected user and then click Backspace.

The following video (3:12) illustrates how Smart Recorder search works. Although the video was recorded in classic Smart IT version 19.08, it applies to other versions of BMC Helix ITSM.

https://youtu.be/3IrHkbxARVw

Tickets and knowledge search

BMC Helix ITSM uses the Apache Lucene-based Full Text Search (FTS) engine of Action Request System. FTS has a Relevancy Ranking algorithm which considers the Search text typed in by the user and the FTS indexes fields for Ticket and Knowledge forms. The relevancy ranking algorithm assigns a score to every record searched and the search results are ordered by decreasing score value.

How the scoring works

The score, and therefore the relevance of a ticket or knowledge is calculated by considering the following. All the following factors are considered while deciding the score and position of the search result. The scoring is done for every field of the Ticket or Knowledge using these factors and the relevancy score at field level is aggregated for a final score for every Ticket or Knowledge.

The frequency of search terms across tickets or knowledge records - For example, if the word email is included in 8000 of 10000 tickets or knowledge records, but the word configuration is in a much smaller number of tickets or knowledge records, then the term configuration is considered more relevant than the term email
The number of times a search term appears in a ticket or knowledge - For example, if the word email appears five times in one of the fields say Summary, that ticket or knowledge is considered more relevant than another ticket or knowledge that might only contain the term email once.
The length of the text - For example, if a search term is found in a ticket or knowledge that contains a short amount of text, that ticket/knowledge is considered more relevant than a ticket/knowledge with a larger amount of text.

Configuration to influence the relevancy ranking

You can use some additional configuration within Knowledge Management and AR System:

Relevancy Weights for certain fields - For example, searches against Title, Keywords or Environment fields can be ranked higher than rest of the fields.
Knowledge Use or View Boost factors - Knowledge articles which are viewed or related frequently can be ranked higher than rest of the articles.

Template search

For template matching, the following searches are performed:

Full Text Search on Incident Templates—By default, restricted to those templates where agent has access to the Authoring Company defined against them. There is a configuration in BMC Helix ITSM Database (Business_Schema) to consider only those templates where the authoring support groups defined against the templates matches the support groups Agent is part of
Full Text Search on Work Order Template
Full Text Search on SRDs —Restricted to those SRDs where Customer has required Entitlement defined against those SRDs

The Full Text matching is done using the Relevancy Ranking algorithm explained in earlier section. The ranking rules remain the same.

Important

When you search for a template in Smart Recorder, the search results may not display the accurate count of matching templates.

The final result is ordered as follows

Incident templates matched in descending order of score (maximum of 20)
SRDs matched in descending order of score (maximum of 100)
Work order templates matched in descending order of score (maximum of 20)

Outage search

FTS search is performed on Outages based on CI Name or Outage (Unavailability) Description and restricted to the Company of the Customer (maximum of top 20).

Company-specific search for assets and people

As a service desk agent, when capturing details in Smart Recorder, you can refine the search for asset and people (customer, contact, and the people mentioned) on the ticket by specifying the company to which the asset and people belong. If there are multiple companies, specifying the company name helps to refine the search and display the exact result. To do so, you must first enter the Hash symbol (#) followed by the company name, and then enter the At symbol (@) followed by the asset or person name. For example, #Calbro @Allen @A01Printer fix the issue urgently. In this example, both Allen and A01Printer belong to Calbro.

To enable you to search for assets and people on the basis of the #company accelerator, the administrator must set the value of the smartRecorderSearchByCompany property to true in the Centralized Configuration. The modification is reflected after 30 minutes, or you can restart BMC Helix ITSM to get the modification. For more details, see Setting configuration parameters in BMC Helix ITSM.

Additional scenarios

Asset search is based on the company immediately preceding the asset name. For example, #Calbro @A01Printer.

If you do not specify a company immediately preceding the asset name, then the asset search is based on the customer company. For example, #Calbro @User1 @User2 @Printer 1 #Petramco @User3 @Printer2. Here,

Accelerators	#Calbro	@User1	@User2	@Printer1	#Petramco	@User3	@Printer2
Description	Company 1	Added as Customer User of company 1	Added as Customer User of company 1	This asset is searched on the basis of the customer company, in this case, Company 1	Company 2	Added as Mentioned User of company 2	This asset is searched on the basis of the customer company, in this case, Company 1

The #Company accelerator sets context for the users (customer, contact and @mention), and asset that is specified immediately after the #Company accelerator. For example, #Calbro @Printer1 @User1. Here, both the Printer1 and User1 are searched on the basis of the company accelerator #Calbro. Note that the #company accelerator does not set context for the entire string that is added after it.
If you do not add the #company accelerator, the user and asset is searched in context of the company to which the logged in service desk agent has access. For example, on the Smart Recorder Mary types @Allen @Printer1 issues must be fixed urgently. Mary is a service desk agent and has access to Calbro and Petramco. On the Smart Recorder when she searches for @Allen and @Printer1, the system searches for the users and assets of Calbro and Petramco.
You can enter multiple #Company accelerators. Here, one #Company mention sets context for all the following @references, until the next #Company accelerator is used. For example, My request is for #Calbro @Allen @Asset1 who wants to help #Petramco @Maria to fix her @Asset2. You can use this !Template2 and !SRD_2. Here,

Accelerators	#Calbro	@Allen	@Asset1	#Petramco	@Maria	@Asset2	!Template2	!SRD_2
Description	Company 1	Added as Contact User of company 1	The Asset1 is searched on the basis of Company 1. This asset is set as the Related asset. Note: If you enter @Asset1 after you enter the entire string, then the Asset1 is searched on the basis of customer company, in this case, company 2	Company 2	Added as Customer User of company 2	The Asset2 is searched on the basis of customer company, in this case, company 2 This asset is set as the Affected asset.

If you insert an accelerator before #Petramco, then context is #Calbro, if you insert an accelerator after #Petramco, then the context is #Petramco.

In the above example, if you remove #Calbro then all the following @ accelerators have the context of the next company, in this case #Petramco (same applies to editing of selected entries customer/client/srd/template).
If you enter two users for the first #company, the first user is the contact and the second user is the customer. If you now change the selected roles from contact to customer and vice-a-versa, the contexts does not change. Nothing changes except the role of the user.

Consider an example, #Calbro @User1 @Printer1 #Petramco @User2 #Calbro @User3 @Asset1. In this case, the Asset1 is searched from the customer company i.e Petramco. Here,

Accelerator	#Calbro	@User1	@Printer1	#Petramco	@User2	#Calbro	@User3	@Asset1
Description	Company1	Added as Customer User of company 1	The Printer1 is searched on the basis of Company 1. This asset is set as the Related asset.	Company 2	Added as Customer User of company 2	Company1	Added as Mentioned User of company 1	The Asset1 is searched on the basis of customer company, in this case, company 2 This asset is set as the Affected asset.

When you manually set the customer as contact and contact as customer, the asset search is based on the customer company. For example, in Smart Recorder you enter #Calbro@ User1 @Printer1 #Petramco @User2 @Asset1. In this case, the system sets User1 as the contact and User2 as customer, and the Asset1 is searched on the basis of the customer company in this case, Petramco. When you manually set User1 as customer and User2 as contact, the @Asset1 is searched from the customer company in this case, Calbro. If you remove the #Company accelerator after selecting people or asset, the selection you have made does not change. For example, when you enter #Calbro @User1 @Asset1 and then remove #Calbro and once again search for asset and user, the system searches from Calbro.

The #Company is a helper text, and it will not be copied to ticket title and description.