Clients that I work with have been using Ivanti Service Manager for many years. When we begin working together on the first items, we address how they get their work, how do they process the work, and where they feel their current process are lacking. The reason is because quite often unguided customers build their systems in a way that Ivanti Service Manager was not designed to function. That does not mean what they built is necessarily wrong, but instead, they may be overlooking some key features that come with Ivanti Service Manager right out the gate. Here are three of the most overlooked functions within the Knowledge workspace.
- Feedback – The Feedback section in a knowledge article appears as a child tab within the form. Feedback can be given in 2 ways, from Self Service or directly to the article by an analyst. When looking at Feedback, out of the box, you are given a star rating, a question asking whether or not the article was useful, and then an additional comments box. The real power comes from setting up automatic actions such as workflows to fire when users indicate that the article was not helpful. We can design those workflows to send the Author an email or assign them a Task to review the article and the feedback to see why these users are not getting the answers they need.
- Collections – Collections are the primary way customers can sort and partition knowledge articles to their end users. Out of the box you are given a handful of collection options such as “Company Policy & Procedure”, “IT Knowledge” and “Customer Knowledge”. Once you have your articles in the system, we would work to segment the knowledge so the right people are seeing the right articles. This is typically done at a role level. For instance, we can design it so the Self-Service users only see “Company Policy & Procedure” and “Customer Knowledge”. Whereas analysts only see “Service Desk” and “IT Knowledge. Managers or higher should be able to see all collections.
- Expiration Dates – Having articles out there for you end users is a great way to increase ticket deflection, but as long as those articles still provide value. Sometimes the knowledge we share with end users has an expiration on them where the information is no longer needed or needs to be updated with the latest updates. We can utilize the expiration date to start workflows and triggers that send emails or create tasks to the author and owner when an article has expired for further review. This will help keep the old info out of the system and make sure we are presenting only the most up to date and relevant information to your end user.
These are just a few items I see customers underutilizing in Ivanti Service Manager. Imagine what else Dataseti can do for you! Contact us today and let us help you make your Ivanti Service Manager a better platform for your organization.