CASE STUDY
Every incident had a ticket.
The same ones kept wrong.
They asked us to roll out ServiceNow so IT incidents were finally logged and tracked. The scope: tracking was never the gap — the same incidents kept recurring because nothing tied them to a root cause, and every major incident was still run by hand.
Real Problem
“Give us ServiceNow so we can finally log and track our IT incidents properly.”
Scope
Tracking wasn't the problem — recurrence was. Incidents were closed but never linked to a root cause, so the same outages returned and majors ran on a manual bridge.
The Challenge
A financial-services firm — a retail bank with a busy, heavily regulated IT estate — ran a service desk that logged thousands of incidents a month. Tickets were captured and closed on time and the metrics looked healthy. Yet the same outages kept returning and major incidents dragged. A diagnostic found three compounding causes.
- Closed, never solved. Incidents were resolved one by one; nothing linked recurring incidents to a common root cause, so problem management never happened.
- Major incidents run by hand. A P1 meant manually spinning up a bridge, paging people and chasing updates — coordination lived in chat and memory.
- Routine tickets swamped the desk. Password resets and how-do-I questions consumed analysts who should have been fixing the hard problems.
The Solution
- Route it right : ServiceNow ITSM with intelligent incident routing, so incidents reach the right team first time instead of bouncing between queues.
- Find the root cause : Recurring incidents linked to ServiceNow problem management, so repeat issues are traced to a single root cause and fixed for good — not closed and forgotten.
- Run majors, deflect the rest : A major-incident workflow coordinates P1s automatically — bridge, roles, comms — while a virtual agent and knowledge base deflect routine requests to self-service.
The Impact
35%
Fewer repeat incidents
Recurring issues traced to root cause and closed for good.
40%
Lower MTTR
Mean time to resolution, from routing and clean knowledge.
30%
Routine tickets deflected
Handled by self-service and the virtual agent.
The win wasn't faster tickets. It was incidents that finally stopped coming back.