Overview

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To better aid customers in self-resolving their cases, group managers can enable this feature so that users can receive an automatically generated list of Knowledge Base articles. Managers also have the ability to enforce certain articles to always appear in this list of these "recommended" articles.

In this article: 

• Step-by-step Guide for Automatic Determination of Relevant Articles
• Step-by-step Guide for Manual Inclusion of Articles
• Notification to the User
• What Happens When Users Choose "Close my case"
• Helpful Tips + Tools

Step-by-step Guide for Automatic Determination of Relevant Articles

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To have ServiceNow automatically determine what might be the (up to) three most relevant Knowledge Base articles based on the email subject/case short description:

1. Navigate to a group record that you manage by clicking your assignment group name in a list of cases
2. Go to the section/tab titled "Case Knowledge"
3. Mark the "Enable KB Articles in cases?" checkbox as true to reveal the additional fields
4. Choose "Automatic" for the attachment record.
5. Select "Allow recipient to resolve case via email link" if you want "This solved my issue" links to appear next to the knowledge articles. Recipients that click these links will initiate a process that automatically moves their case to the "Solution proposed" status.
6. If you selected the option in step 5, you can now select "Require user to confirm resolution after clicking link." Enabling this will add a confirmation step after the user clicks the "This solved my issue" link.
7. Update the group record.

Using this method, ServiceNow will attempt to find public knowledge base articles in this order:

1. Articles that contain every word that is found in the email subject/case short description
2. If no articles are found in step 1, then articles that contain at least one or more words from the email subject/case short description

ServiceNow uses an internal algorithm to rank the found articles by relevancy. The top three articles are chosen for the user. If less than three articles are found, then only that many articles are provided. If no articles are found, this entire functionality is skipped for this case.

Step-by-step Guide for Manual Inclusion of Articles

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If you would rather force certain articles to appear in the list of recommended articles, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to a group record that you manage by clicking your assignment group name in a list of cases
2. Go to the section/tab titled "Case Knowledge"
3. Mark the "Enable KB Articles in cases?" checkbox as true to reveal the additional fields
4. Choose "Manual" for the attachment record.
5. Choose up to three articles that you would like to show up in the recommended list of articles.
6. Select "Allow recipient to resolve case via email link" if you want "This solved my issue" links to appear next to the knowledge articles. Recipients that click these links will initiate a process that automatically moves their case to the "Solution proposed" status.
7. If you selected the option in step 6, you can now select "Require user to confirm resolution after clicking link." Enabling this will add a confirmation step after the user clicks the "This solved my issue" link.
8. Save the group record.

Using this method, ServiceNow will follow the same exact steps noted above for the "automatic" method, but will intentionally place the manually chosen articles first.

For example, in the screenshot above. Article 1 will always be KB0030588 v2.0. Since Article 2 and Article 3 was left blank, the automatic method will be run to try to fill in these two spaces. Likewise, if Article 1 and Article 2 was left blank but Article 3 was manually chosen, the automatic method will run to try to fill the first two spaces and the manually chosen article will be listed as number 3.

Notification to the User

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Configuring this feature will tell ServiceNow to include the following section in their "Case CS0001000 opened - SHORT_DESCRIPTION" email that is generated upon the opening of every case:

Clicking on an article short description brings them to that article in the Service Portal.

 

What Happens When Users Choose "Close my case"

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When a user clicks on "Close my case" in their email, they will be sent to the Service Portal and will immediately see the following:

If the case was already resolved or closed, the user will instead see:

In the agent view of ServiceNow, the case is updated in the following ways:

• A comment is added to the case stating that the case has been closed by the customer and provides a link to the knowledge article that helped the customer
  
  
  
  
• The resolution notes are set to "Closed by Knowledge Article" and a hidden field "Knowledge Article" is revealed and set to the knowledge article that helped the customer
  
  
  
  
• The case status is set to "Solution Proposed"

Helpful Tips + Tools

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An easy way to see a list of groups you are allowed to configure to utilize this feature can be found by clicking this link

There is also a Case Knowledge Query Testing Tool that allows you to

• See what articles will appear for certain cases
• Type in your own short description to see what articles will be provided
• See what articles are being shown to users the most
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