“Was this Email Helpful?”

Convince your users to stop ignoring email from your instance, automatically deleting it, or filtering it to junk!

This tool helps you accomplish that goal by allowing and encouraging users to provide simple binary feedback on whether each notification your instance sends out was helpful or not, as well as leave some free-text comments.
Once users have left some feedback, you’ll be able to run some powerful reports to learn how your users feel about your notifications. Some reports are built-in, lots more are part of the “PA Pack” (linked below), and others you can build and customize however you like!

In addition to soliciting and reporting user sentiment feedback on your notifications, the WtEH tool also tracks email open rates, which lets you know what sorts of notifications are most likely to be deleted without being read.

Once you’ve identified which notifications need changing, using WtEH, what should you do to change them?
Click here for a detailed article on email notifications in ServiceNow (Including my advice on how to improve your notifications)!

This tool was developed by myself (Tim Woodruff)/The SN Guys, in collaboration with Robert Fedoruk of Vividcharts.
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Download

Download the latest release XML file here.

PA Pack

Download the latest PA Pack release XML file here.

Note: The PA Pack requires a Performance Analytics premium license. The PA Pack is not required for the core app to function. The core app contains several reports using the OOB reporting engine in ServiceNow.

Intro & Demo Video

Features

The “Was this Email Helpful” (WtEH) application is fairly simple at first glance, but packs a lot of functionality under the hood.

The primary (and namesake) feature of the WtEH tool, is that it allows you to request feedback from your users on which notifications they find helpful (or not), and why. It allows you to add a simple “Was this helpful - Yes/No” box to the bottom of each email, which users can click to provide their feedback. They can also choose to leave a comment on the notification to indicate why they found it helpful or not.
The votes and comments on notification helpfulness, feed into some pre-built reports that we’ve made for you as part of the app. If you have the Performance Analytics Premium license and have installed the “PA Pack” (see the Download>PA Pack section above), you’ll also get some advanced PA reports, including a word cloud to allow you to analyze not just the sentiment relating to a given notification, but also the specific words and phrases used in those comments, to find out exactly why your users do (or don’t) like specific notifications.

In addition to the namesake “was this email helpful” buttons, WtEH also adds a little bit of clever code into each email that should allow you to actually track email open rates, and find which of your notifications are being deleted without being read most frequently. This can indicate that the notification subject may need to be changed, or that perhaps the notification shouldn’t exist at all!

WtEH contains a built-in update checker. Whenever a new version of the app is released, it’ll detect that and show you a notification whenever you view a feedback record (only if you’re an admin). The update checker does not auto-update the app, you must download and install the update yourself. (You can also turn off these notifications if you like.)

WtEH is highly configurable, and many options are built right into the settings page. For example, you can choose whether comments should be mandatory whenever a user is leaving feedback, only when leaving positive feedback, only when leaving negative feedback, or whether comments should never be mandatory (default). You can also configure the “Helpful” / “Not helpful” button text, text color, background, color, and loads more. Check out the “Configuration” section below for more information.

The WtEH tool is only one part of a holistic approach to improving your notifications, reducing “email overload”, and helping your users know what they need to do and when they need to do it. Notifications should be actionable, immediate (or “digestible”), and relevant. For more information on how to improve your approach to notifications holistically, check out our article on the topic, here.

Installation

Follow the steps below, to install the “Was this Email Helpful” application on your ServiceNow instance.
Required role: admin

  1. Download the Update Set XML file from the link in the Download section of this page.

    1. If there are multiple files available in the release, you can ignore them and just download the XML file.

  2. Log into your ServiceNow Dev instance as a user with the admin role, and navigate to System Update Sets > Retrieved Update Sets.

  3. Scroll to the bottom of the list, and click the “Import Update Set from XML” UI Action under Related Links.

  4. Click the Choose File button, and select the XML file you downloaded from the link in step 1, then click the Upload button.

  5. Return to the Retrieved Update Sets list (System Update Sets > Retrieved Update Sets), and find the Update Set you just imported. The name should begin with “SNG-Was this email helpful”. Click on that Update Set.

  6. If the State of the Update Set is Loaded, then hit the Preview Update Set button. If it’s set to Previewed, skip this step.

  7. After the Update Set is previewed, click on the Commit Update Set UI Action, and accept the prompt to commit the Update Set. This will install the “Was this Email Helpful” application.

Setup

After installing Was this Email Helpful (WtEH), all you have to do to start collecting feedback, is add one line to the contents of each of the notifications that you want to get feedback on. Open up a notification record (from the sysevent_email_action table), navigate to the What is will contain form section/tab, and at the bottom of the Message HTML field, add the following line:

${mail_script:was_this_email_helpful}

You may also want to consider adding this line to any templates you’re using heavily on your notifications.

Once you’ve done that, you can just sit back and let the feedback flow in, but it’s best to make sure to let your users know that you’re adding that functionality, and ask them to please provide their feedback so that you can work to improve notifications that come from your ServiceNow environment.

Configuration

The WtEH app is highly configurable out of the box. You can customize much of the look, feel, and behavior from the Email feedback > Email feedback settings module in the Application Navigator. This module is only visible to application admins (users with the x_13231_helpful_em.helpful_emails_admin role), and most properties can only be modified by users with that role.
By default, all admins in your environment should automatically be granted this role when the app is installed.

Clicking on the Email feedback settings module will take you to a settings interface, where each of the configuration options can be found. Each setting is well explained in that interface, but here is a quick primer on just a few of them:

  • allow_multiple_feedbacks_from_user: Allows each user to submit feedback on the same notification multiple times, as long as the actual email that their feedback corresponds to is unique.
    This does not allow users to click the “Not helpful” button on the same email over and over to flood the system with negative feedback, but they could submit feedback once for each unique email they got of that notification type.

  • question_text: This is the text that’s displayed above the WtEH “helpful” / “not helpful” buttons in the email after the mail script line is added to the notification.

  • show_warning_when_app_update_available: This setting is true by default, and controls whether a notification should be shown at the top of the form when viewing an “Email feedback” record, if (a) you’re an admin, and (b) there’s an update available for the WtEH application.

  • require_comment_on_positive_feedback / require_comment_on_negative_feedback: Controls whether feedback comments are required on the Email feedback form by default, when the user is leaving positive or negative feedback respectively. To make comments always required, enable both of these properties. To never require comments, disable both of them (default).

Looking for ServiceNow Help?

If you’re looking for some help getting the most value out of your ServiceNow investment, The SN Guys are here for you!
Just click on that little blue “Free Architectural Review” button at the bottom-right of your screen, and schedule some time to chat with us. From the window that pops up, you can select a free arch review, or just a casual 30/60-minute chat.

These calls are always just to find out what you’re looking for and see if we’re a good fit to help you out with it. They always come with zero sales pressure.