Communicating with stakeholders about incidents and major incidents
Summarize
Summary of Communicating with stakeholders about incidents and major incidents
ServiceNow provides a structured way to communicate with stakeholders throughout the lifecycle of incidents and major incidents using theCommunicatetab. This feature enables incident and major incident managers to create, manage, and track communication tasks to ensure timely and effective stakeholder engagement.
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Key Features
- Group By: Organize communication tasks by communication plan or by completion status (Overdue, Upcoming, Completed, Skipped) for clear task management.
- Filter by Communication Plan: Easily view communication tasks associated with a specific communication plan.
- Compose: Create communication messages using multiple channels including email, SMS, Microsoft Teams, and Slack to reach stakeholders in their preferred medium.
- Manage Recipients: Add or remove users and roles as recipients for communication tasks to ensure appropriate stakeholders are informed.
- New Communication Task: Allows users with the majorincidentmanager role or both iaadmin and itil roles to create new communication tasks as needed.
- Manage Announcements: Broadcast announcements to Service Portal users to keep them updated on ongoing major incidents, created and deployed via Service Operations Workspace (SOW).
- View Record: Access detailed information about each communication task, with capabilities to initiate calls or chats directly from the interface to collaborate with stakeholders.
- Task Lifecycle Controls:
- Close: Mark communication tasks as Completed or Skipped based on whether communications were sent, helping maintain accurate status tracking.
- Start: Begin communication tasks, changing their status to Pending.
- Snooze: Extend the due time for communication tasks to allow flexibility in timing.
Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers
This functionality empowers ServiceNow customers to maintain clear, consistent, and timely communication with stakeholders during incident resolution. It streamlines communication across various channels, allows targeted recipient management, and supports proactive stakeholder engagement through announcements. Major incident managers can leverage these tools to enhance transparency, reduce confusion, and accelerate incident response coordination.
Use the Communicate tab to create and manage all communications with stakeholders during the various phases of an incident or a major incident.
The Communicate tab contains the following options to create and manage communications:
- Group By
- Group communication tasks the following ways:
- Communication plan – The communication tasks that are associated with a particular communication plan are grouped.
- Completion status - The communication tasks are grouped based on the completion status and due dates. You can choose to list the tasks from the following group sections:
- Overdue – Communication tasks with past due dates.
- Upcoming – Communications tasks with an upcoming due date.
- Completed – Communication tasks that are completed.
- Skipped – Communication tasks that are skipped.
- Filter by communication plan
- Filter the communication task by a communication plan.
- Compose
- Compose a communication message, such as an email, SMS, Microsoft Teams, or Slack message.
- Manage recipients
- Add and manage recipients for a communications task. You can add a user role and a user in the recipient list. You can also access this option by selecting the More actions (
) icon on the communication task and then selecting Manage recipients. - New Communication
- Create a communication task. This option is available only to the following users:
- User with the major_incident_manager role
- User with both the ia_admin and itil roles
- Manage announcements
- Create and manage an announcement to broadcast messages for Service Portal users to keep them informed about the ongoing major incident.
- View Record
- View detailed information about the incident communication task (ICT) record. Select the More actions () icon on the communication task and then select View record.
On the ICT record, you can also initiate a call or chat from the collaborate tab on the side panel using the Collaborate (
) icon on the contextual side panel. For more information, see Collaborate with stakeholders during a major incident. - Close
- Close the communication task. Select the More actions () icon on the communication task and then select Close. The communication task is then moved to either the Completed or Skipped section of the Communicate tab based on the
following scenarios:
- If a communication task has the Frequency field set to Recurring and at least one communication has been composed and sent, selecting Close moves the communication task to the Completed section.
- If a communication task has the Frequency field set to One time or Recurring and no communication has been composed and sent, selecting Close moves the communication task to the Skipped section.
- Start
- Start the communication task with the Pending status. Select the More actions () icon on the communication task and then select Start.
- Snooze
- Increase the Due in time for a communication task. Select the More actions () icon on the communication task and then select Snooze.