This comes up periodically. Users who have dealt with other major Incident Management systems expect this feature; so it's a bit of a mystery why it is still not on the road map after all these years.

An outage of whatever service typically starts with one report. Then another agent might take another report; soon we end up with many reports, all dealing with the same issue. We escalate at that point, but now we have multiple incidents related to the same problem. We need to combine those and escalate them as a single incident; we also need to be able to update all those users in a unified way concerning that incident.

Over the past five years since we implemented RightNow, we've developed ways to work around the problem; including channeling those incidents into a different ticketing system that does support this standard function. It's not ideal, but it's better than trying to work with this type of issue in the RightNow product.

I would rate this as one of my top five issues.

What is the primary need for the combination:

(1) simplified agent workflow (ie, multi-edit and respond as a group)

(2) reporting (ie, 3 groups of incidents, one with 10, one with 7 and one with 4)

(3) escalation to back-office/experts

(4) something else?

Are there secondary or tertiary needs as well?