Let's assume that your IT help desk frequently receives repeat incidents from your end users reporting an issue in sending email notifications. You have analyzed and provided the resolution that a fresh configuration in the SMTP server would fix the issue. You have also included the configuration steps in the documentation, covered it on your website's troubleshooting section, and added it in the application's knowledge base. However,  you receive the same question frequently and get tired of providing the same resolution again and again.

Sound familiar? The problem is universal. No matter how good or informative your knowledge base is, it is always hard to convince end users to check the knowledge base prior to raising incidents.

Here's how you can facilitate your end users  to help themselves with ​"Solution auto suggest" in ServiceDesk Plus and reduce the calls to your IT help desk.

When a user creates a new request through self-service portal, solution articles from knowledge base and announcements are automatically suggested to the user.

That is, when an end user uses the incident template to create an incident through self-service portal and keys in ‘Outgoing’ as the subject , the below solution will automatically pop up.

Take aways:

This feature can help your IT team in the following ways,

• Makes the users to inadvertently access the knowledge base
• Reduces the number of how-to requests and repetitive incidents that eventually enable technicians’ to focus on other issues

How to configure:

To enable this feature, simply go to Admin -> Self-service portal settings -> Show suggestions to requesters while creating a new incident request.

To know how many repetitive requests are prevented from being created, go to Reports -> New Query Report -> execute the query “ select * from autosuggestinfo ”.