Offering Closed Jira Service Desk Tickets as a Knowledge Database to Reduce Duplicate Requests?

[Abdelkader Wahb]

Hello Atlassian Community,

Great to be part of this community!

In our company, we use Jira Service Management as a Data Center, and I am an admin for several "Jira Service Desk projects" that we have successfully implemented (not Admin of the jira Service Management Server). These projects bring significant value, structure, and relief to our team, especially thanks to automation.

We are currently facing the following issue in our Jira Service Desk: requester/reporter (Other internal employees in the company) frequently submit the same requests on similar topics. The situation is as follows:

• We receive many requests via Jira Service Desk, but often there are duplicate tickets for issues that have already been addressed and successfully resolved, sometimes with excellent solutions.
• We have created a Confluence help page and linked it in the Service Desk as a knowledge database, yet we still receive requests on topics that have already been handled.
• Currently, requesters do not have access to other previous tickets due to confidentiality settings in Jira. They can only view tickets that have been explicitly shared with them by an agent.
• Our Service Desk agents often share well-handled tickets internally for reference.
• usage of marketplace.atlassian app is not allowed

We are now looking for a solution that would allow Requester to search for old tickets and access relevant information on their own, without needing to submit a new ticket.

My Questions:

1. Is there a way to give requester access to old tickets in Jira Service Desk without violating confidentiality?
2. What best practices or tools can you recommend to improve self-service and reduce duplicate tickets?
3. Are there alternative solutions, such as automating the detection of similar tickets or improving the integration of the knowledge base?

I would appreciate any suggestions on how to optimize this process, enabling requester to access relevant information from previous tickets while ensuring confidentiality.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Abdel

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Abdelkader Wahb and welcome to the Community!

Customers of your service portal will only have access to their own tickets or tickets shared with them. That is not something you can change;

The approach you currently apply by adding valuable solutions to the knowledge base, is the very best thing you can do. It overcomes the problem that many tickets are not visible to your customers and that you have control over how your knowledge is structured and written, opening it up to everyone accessing your help center. At the same time, do accept that people sometimes create a ticket, even if your knowledge base does provide a valid answer. Here in the Atlassian Community, hundreds of thousands of questions have been asked and answered and many questions get asked (and answered) again and again. The personal approach you (as a service provider) offer at that point may have a very significant impact on your customer. So be patient and provide the answer; possibly point out that the answer may be in your knowledge base while doing so.

Lastly, AI assisted support is creating new opportunities everyday to offer solutions to service desk customers from all kinds of sources. That option is only available on the cloud platform, unfortunately, but maybe good to know.

Hope this helps!

[Abdelkader Wahb]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout 

Thank you for your quick and helpful response!

You are absolutely right – even with a well-structured knowledge base, some customers will still create tickets.

Your mention of AI-assisted support was new to me and is very interesting. We might have the opportunity to try this in a cloud instance. I will definitely look into it further and see what additional benefits it could bring us.

Best regards,
Abdel

[Susan Waldrip]

Great questions and answer, @Abdelkader Wahb and @Walter Buggenhout . I'd like to follow up on Abdelkader's Question #2 above,

• What best practices or tools can you recommend to improve self-service and reduce duplicate tickets?

I'm dealing with this, as well, and was hoping that the Create (Confluence) Page button in the JSM Issue View screen would create a page AND copy the ticket info (or some of it) into the new page, but it doesn't work that way. Any suggestions and links to resources and best practices for incorporating ticket content into a knowledge base would be much appreciated!

[Lucas Modzelewski _Lumo_]

During my time in support, we used to create multiple FAQ and how-to articles with labels and questions/problems phrased in different ways (on the same page). This ensured that even if a user wasn’t precise enough, they could still find relevant articles before creating a ticket.

When we first started, I would create FAQ pages before responding to a customer so that I could reference that page in my response. :)

If you want to encourage users to read the articles, some form of 'acknowledgment' from the user—confirming they’ve checked related articles—could be useful. Alternatively, automation could suggest related knowledge base (KB) articles in the first response after a ticket is created, requiring the user to reject those recommendations before advancing the support workflow. This would serve as a 'disapproval' of the proposed solutions.

On the other hand, if you're dealing with multiple tickets about the same issue due to an incident, it would be wise to display information about the current status of the issue. This could help discourage users from reporting the same problem. If people are reporting issues, that's a good thing! It shows they are engaged and involved—they want to alert you that something is wrong. They simply might not know if someone else has already reported the problem.