ConnectNow / Cherwell Integration

We’re so busy here at TwoHouses that we haven’t had the opportunity to use the blog that we’ve set up. We’re far too busy developing and simply don’t have the time to talk about it!

However, as I wait for Visual Studio to perform a 6GB update whilst I install some third party tools that I need to start developing integrating with JIRA, I thought I’d write this post explaining the latest feature in ConnectNow.

We’ve been fortunate to work alongside David Knowles over at iServiceSolutions, who are a Cherwell reseller, among other things. We’ve began working on integrating ConnectNow with various software packages, and Cherwell is the first of a long list.

Cherwell

Over the last ~8 years, I’ve seen my fair share of Service Management/Ticket Logging/Incident Tracking/Whatever you want to call them systems. HP Service Manager, Service Now, Remedy, Hornbill… the list goes on. Having worked as a Senior in a large-scale Service Desk for a multi-national corporation for several years, I know my way around an Incident ticket, and I appreciate a good piece of software when I see one.  Cherwell covers all of these bases, but offers so much more in terms of scalability and customisation. I’ll admit it rivals (or may even surpass) ConnectNow itself in some areas, which was – and is – designed to be as flexible as possible.

The Integration

The integration itself went smoothly enough with some helpful nudges in the right direction from David and his team, and we were successfully logging tickets in Cherwell in no time. We’ve gone one step further, and facilitate the search and creation of customer records within Cherwell itself. This was a requirement as ConnectNow has its own customer records, and to log a ticket, this customer needs to exist in Cherwell. Rather than failing to create the Incident and asking an agent to manually add the customer, we went full-force and created the following workflow.

1. Agent initiates logging an Incident to Cherwell
2. ConnectNow initiates a search for the customer in Cherwell, using the demographic information available.
3. The Agent can manually override this search for another record, if appropriate. This also negates the issue where the customer’s name may be different between the two applications.
4. The Agent can create a new customer directly, if required. The form is prefilled with as much information is available from ConnectNow, and can be reset at any time.
5. If the Agent created a new customer, this new customer is automatically selected. Alternatively, the Agent picks the correct customer from the list.
6. Those additional fields that are mandatory in Cherwell are displayed. In this instance, we see a Criticality/Severity matrix for the Priority field.
7. The ticket is logged, and the reference number shared with the Customer via a chat message as well as in the summary

Moving Forward

There’s more we’d like to do with Cherwell in the future. Having all of a customer’s chats displayed in Cherwell is an obvious win, and we’d also like to both push ConnectNow’s alerts to Cherwell, and vice versa. We’re continuing to work with David and his team and hope to work closer together in the future.