Bulk inform customers at major outages

[m.vandun]

Hi,

Lately we had the unfortunate opportunity  to have a couple of major incidents which struck a lot of our customers.  A major flaw we found in Hornbill is the ability to inform our customers in bulk, via email. We create a problem ticket and then link the individual incidents to this problem ticket. For closing all linked incidents this works fine as we can close all incidents with the same solution and the customers receive an email with the closure essage due to the BPM. But during the outage we are not able to pro-activily inform our customers to our standard. I can send our customers an update via the PM when I manually link the customer to the PM and add them to the BCC but this takes hours to do, especially when there are 200+ incidents.

Adding a solution for the problem would really benefit the useabillity of Hornbill during major outages.

Regards,
Mark

[Steven Boardman]

@m.vandun we have a story which is planned and hopefully not to far away now, which will allow you from a parent ticket to apply an update to either all, or selective linked requests.  This will allow you to apply an update to the problem record, which in turn will update the child Incidents.  If the update is marked as customer facing, then the customers of the Incidents will receive an automated email letting them know their Incidents have been updated (so essentially like the cascading down of the resolution on closure of the problem, but with this it will be on manual updates to the parent ticket).

As i say this story is defined and planned, once we have a firmer date on this we'll update this post. 

[HHH]

@Steven Boardman

Following since this is a welcome addition

[Martyn Houghton]

@Steven Boardman

The automated email update on the linked requests you mention, will this carry the content of the update or just the generic link advising them to log in to the service/customer portal?

The other element we have with being external support, not all interested parties will have logged a request yet and have a linked request. This is why we had raised the idea previously of having the ability for Coworkers/Contacts to subscribe to notifications in relation to a 'Service' so that those who subscribe can be sent notifications such as outage updates, similar to the Hornbill Status outage notifications.

The idea it to be pro-active and keeping the subscribers to the services informed, rather than the reactive updates to only those who have logged linked requests. Yes we can update the status information on the Service, but that is reliant on the CoWorkers/Contacts logging into the portal. Having the ability to utilise service based email notifications would make managing major incidents a lot easier and provide a more professional image of the service.

Cheers

Martyn

 

 

[HHH]

I like your idea @Martyn Houghton

[nasimg]

1 hour ago, Steven Boardman said:

@m.vandun we have a story which is planned and hopefully not to far away now, which will allow you from a parent ticket to apply an update to either all, or selective linked requests.  This will allow you to apply an update to the problem record, which in turn will update the child Incidents.  If the update is marked as customer facing, then the customers of the Incidents will receive an automated email letting them know their Incidents have been updated (so essentially like the cascading down of the resolution on closure of the problem, but with this it will be on manual updates to the parent ticket).

As i say this story is defined and planned, once we have a firmer date on this we'll update this post. 

@Steven Boardman @Martyn Houghton I would like to see both these options available - so a big +1 from me.

Nasim

[Steven Boardman]

@Martyn Houghton the capability i was referring to was that which now exists on each ticket - i.e an option for a customer to get an email (with a link) to let them know their ticket has been updated, and the link take them to the request, and this provides the relevant detail.    This will be extended out, so that if the parent ticket is updated, and the linked tickets are to be updated, they will receive an email with a link to their ticket, which will in turn contain the update from the parent ticket.   

In regards to the opt-in notifications per service, we do have this story in the list to do, and i have added @nasimg and @HHH Martyn you are already connected to this one.  As there is any progress on this we will look to update this post. 

 

[Martyn Houghton]

@Steven Boardman

Thanks for confirm, that it is just the current existing generic email update with the link in and adding the connections on the other notification story.

Cheers

Martyn

[David Longley]

@Steven Boardman please can i be made aware when this is live within the system

[Steven Boardman]

@David Longley of course.  I've just checked and this work has been completed, it is currently in review before being included in a Service Manager update.  Assuming the reviews are all fine, i would expect to see it to be available in the coming weeks

[m.vandun]

@Steven Boardman

Has this been released already?

[Steven Boardman]

@m.vandun I believe so, but just to be clear i'll explain what i was referring too.

1. We introduced the option to allow you to choose if the customer of a request will receive an email notification when a request is updated, and the update is customer facing.  

2. We recently released the ability for for you to be able to apply an update (from a parent ticket), to all or selective linked tickets.  

Now in combining the two features you can achieve this.

So if you update a parent ticket, and the update is Customer facing, and you choose to update linked child tickets, as long as the service the linked tickets are logged against, also allows for Customer updates to notify the customer via email, then they will receive an email letting them know there is an update to their ticket, when they follow the link in the email to their ticket, it will show them the update from the parent ticket.

I hope this makes sense?

@David Longley FYI

 

  

 

[HGrigsby]

Hi @Steven Boardman

Thanks for the update I have used the suggestion above but what we really need to do is to be able to email a number of users with an open or on-hold tickets, we have a lot that we need to send an update to while we are off site and for when we have a major incident as in @m.vandun's original post.

We  have also been asked (which I am sure is on another thread) to be able to select a group of calls an put them on hold or take them off hold.

Thanks Helen 

[HGrigsby]

+++ 1

we really need to have a way of emailing a lot of users from a linked ticket or from a list of tickets 

I have created an autotask and custom button to send an email but I still have to go into each one and we have over 100 linked tickets on one major incident 

The option of changing the settings as above doesn't seem to send a notification email out  although I can update the linked tickets.

Any help would really be appreciated