How to transition a ticket to "Waiting for customer" without sending email to customer from JIRA?

[Tom Worster]

Evaluating Jira Service Desk.

We send all support email from our individual business email accounts using our local email client apps. We don't want to change that.

So, how can I change JSD's rules so that I can manually change an issue's state from "Waiting for service" to "Waiting for customer" in the JSD dashboard after I replied to the customer with normal email?

In the current config it seems this transition can only happen by using JIRA to communicate with the customer. This is too enterprisey and mechanical for our style of support. We want instead to keep the personal touch. So we want a service desk that keeps track of our communications without taking them over.

[Tom Worster · Accepted solution]

@Raynard Rhodesanswer gave me the hint i needed to find the next step. thanks.

there's a whole mess of complexity available in designing your own workflows, issue types, workflow schemata, forms, displays, metrics, blah blah all that enterprisey stuff middle managers like. the trial for JSD is initially populated with a load of stuff that's useless to us. so we need to delete it all and start over with one issue type and one simple workflow. i managed to find how to create a new workflow but haven't had time to do it.

and that's the difficulty we have with jira, as with zendesk and presumably the others, is their intrinsic complexity. to make it work for us, i need to dedicate somebody's time to administration of jira. i have to invest in taming jira's baroque complexity before i can know if it even has the possibility to be useful to us.

our firm has only two full-time staff. we've spent hours on it already and only gotten started. it's really discouraging.

[Raynard Rhodes]

Under Project Settings > Customer Notifications you should see "Customer-visible status changed". You can disable this so it will never email them when you transition to a new status.

[Tom Worster]

We have that set already.

But, afaict, the only way the UI allows this transition is if I fill in a form that requires a message and that has a submit button labeled "Respond to customer." It would be pretty confusing if submitting that form did not respond to the customer.

[Raynard Rhodes]

I think I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

What form are you filling out? We may not be on the same page here.

[Tom Worster]

Here's an ISD. I replied to a customer's question by email, cc: support desk, asking the customer for more info.

The state WAITING FOR SUPPORT is wrong so I have to change it to WAITING FOR CUSTOMER. How do I do this?

The Workflow dropdown menu for changing the ISD's state does not allow this transition.

If I click the Respond to customer button then I get this form, the one I was talking about.

I hesitate to use it because I already responded to the customer by email and that's why I need to change the ISD state.

On the list of ISD's there's another dropdown menu like this

This suggests to me that the business logic for this service desk allows directly transitioning the ISD state to IN PROGRESS, ESCALATED, RESOLVED, CANCELED and PENDING but the only way to transition to WAITING FOR CUSTOMER (the only state that correctly represents the real world status) is by completing the Respond to customer action.

So the problem is not that state transitions trigger automatic notifications (which can be disabled). The problem is that I cannot transition except as a result of sending a message.

How can I resolve this? It seems I need to customize the business logic of this app.

[Raynard Rhodes]

Seems like whoever created that workflow added a pop-up screen that forces your to comment.

If you view the workflow what transitions are going to "Waiting for Customer"? Are you able to get in touch with the admin? Seems like something that would need to remedy.