Capture Additional Information Without Custom Fields With Playbook Questionnaires

By Ethan Davies

The ServiceNow Platform has become incredibly vast, it is increasingly difficult to keep on top of every update and addition, even in your areas of interested or specialisation. Because of this, ever so often I experience a “Have I been living under a rock?” moment. A moment where you discover a feature (maybe by chance) and you can’t believe you didn’t know about its existence before. That is exactly how I felt when I learned about Playbook Questionnaires at Knowledge 2025!

Playbook Questionnaires offer us a capability to capture information that is relevant to the ticket (in this example we use an Incident) without needing to create additional fields on the record. Just the concept of that makes me think of many implementations where that feature alone would have been able to help reduce significantly the number of fields we needed to create.

The idea here is to insert a Playbook Questionnaire at the relevant point in your Playbook process. There is likely a scenario where a Fulfiller needs to capture information when resolving an Incident, maybe a specific type of Incident where the questions are generally the same / repeatable. This is a perfect use case for the Playbook Questionnaires. In this scenario, we could create a Questionnaire to ask the questions we desire and insert it into the relevant section of the Playbook lifecycle.

We are going to use a trivial example for this article as we are simply demonstrating the capability. In the screenshot below, we can see how a simple two question Playbook Questionnaire would display within the Service Operations Workspace, on an Incident record.

Once we have provided the responses to the Playbook Questionnaire, we then submit, and our answers are recorded.

Within our Playbook Process itself, we can then leverage these answers to further drive the process or make decisions. In this example, we could create a simple branching path if the user responded one way or the other to one of our questions in the Playbook Questionnaire. We could then potentially trigger more appropriate process steps or automations based on the answer they provided. At this point the cogs should be turning, this can be a seriously powerful tool in designing your Playbooks!

Before we proceed further (or get carried away) it is worth noting that currently, the Playbook Questionnaires are only focused on the Fulfiller persona, the person working on the ticket. Only they (and other fulfillers) will be able to see the Playbook Questionnaire, it will not be exposed to the Caller / Requested For, and data entry is only conducted by the Fulfiller. The Fulfiller will likely still need to work with the Caller / Requested For via the ticket to be able to provide answers to the questions in a Playbook Questionnaire.

Now that we understand the concept, let’s look at how you can quickly and easily create a Playbook Questionnaire.

Creating a Playbook Questionnaire

Playbook Questionnaires can be easily inserted in your Playbook as an activity and are listed under the Common Activities. From there, we can begin to create our Questionnaire.

Once we click the “Create Questionnaire” button that will appear once we select the “Questionnaire” activity, we will then see a simple interface from which we can add our questions.

Here we will specify our questions, their order, if they are mandatory, and of course their data type. The two we are showing in this example will probably be the most common. A simple text input, or a selection from a drop down of some kind. Although these use cases are simple, there are MANY other data types listed in the “Type of Answer” selection when creating your question. Too many to cover here. But most of the types you would expect to be there (i.e. reference, HTML, True/False) are all there.

Now that we have configured our Questionnaire, we can go ahead and use the Test / Preview functions within the Playbook Designer to see how things look. Here we can double check if our Questionnaire experience is as intended, or if it requires further tweaks. Click the “Test” button within the Playbook Designer.

Our preview shows us how the Playbook and the Questionnaire would render and step through the process within the Workspace interfaces.

 Closing Remarks

Adopting Playbook Questionnaires won’t always be a direct replacement for a custom field on a form, but it can cover a lot of those use cases. It’s a powerful tool to capture information directly related to the record in question without needing to create custom fields to cater for the different permutations and processes related to resolving a ticket.

However, be aware that if you are opting for Playbook Questionnaire over custom fields that reporting on these question responses (if important) would be more difficult (but not impossible) as the data is no longer directly on the target record. Instead, the responses from the Playbook Questionnaire would be stored within the execution history of the Playbook. I would anticipate some improvements in this area in the future.

Using Playbook Questionnaires also makes us think about the decision making and governance required for deciding when a Playbook Questionnaire is suitable to meet the requirements, and when a field on the form is required. Remember, the Playbook experience is not available everywhere in the ServiceNow Platform (notably, the UI16 record view), that will likely be a key factor in your decision making.

Finally, remember that these Questionnaires are Fulfiller facing, not Caller facing. During the session in Knowledge 2025 it was alluded to that this may change in the future, opening up the Callers to provide responses to the Questions on the Playbook Questionnaire, but there is no timeline for that currently.

Hopefully you found this article useful. Go ahead and explore the Playbook Questionnaires on your PDI or instances now!