logging notifications sent to customer for service desk agents

Question

Hi,

a manager of one service desk project would like to see which notifications have been sent already to the customer.

In case of escalation the management and some agents would like to have the ability to see when a notification has been sent or received by email.

In the activity log it is not clear if something has been sent or received by email.

Is there a possibility to see the type communication?

Thank you in advance

Tim

Andy Heinzer · Accepted Answer

Hi Tim,

I see that you are looking to better see exactly what email notifications a Service Desk customer users has received.  This can be very difficult to determine for a number of reasons, the chief among them is that Jira can't really determine if the customer actually got the email message.   Once Jira sends the message with its SMTP server, it could get caught up in the destination mailbox, caught in spam, etc.

Aside from that aspect is that customers can opt-out of email notifications.  This is noted in the Managing service desk notifications.  Should a customer opt-out of notifications on a request, even if there is a triggering change event that would have sent them a notification, they still won't get that email notification.

But assuming these messages are not caught in a spam folder, and the customer has not opted out, there are other limitations in determining what notifications have been sent to that user.  Service Desk is designed to have a different interface between Agents and customers.  In the agent view, they can see and do much more with that issue such as have a number of custom fields that don't appear to the custom portal and create internal comments, which also don't generate notifications or appear to the customer portal.

So while the issue history is a helpful source of changes to the issue, not all changes there are expected to generate a customer notification.   I would recommend checking out the customer notifications rules that are setup for this project.  As an admin you can do this by going to Project settings -> Customer notifications.  These are the rules that are determine when a customer gets a notification, such as request created, request resolved, participants added, customer visible status change are a few examples of default rules.  These can be customized to suit your needs for that project.

Unfortunately there is not an easily audit log of these messages visible to Agents or Admins. It might be possible to change the logging level of outgoing mail to try to capture these, however this method is not really recommended since it would not store this data in an easily traceable method and it would contain all outgoing messages, not just those intended for Service Desk customers.

Instead, the issue history is one starting point you can take to try to determine this.  You just need to factor in the customer notification rules in your project to better understand if that user is expected to get a notification for a specific change or not.  Or perhaps a more simple approach, when you're in the Jira issue, you will see a link on the right side called "View customer request".

This can show you what the customer sees in the portal.  This can at least show you the responses they have seen, but it doesn't always account for the other rules such as customer visible status changes, or when a requested participant has been added.  In turn customers aren't usually expected to get notifications of their own changes through Jira either.

I have not found any other existing solutions for this in Marketplace either.  Sorry there does not currently seem to be a concrete way to determine exactly what notifications have been sent to these users, but I hope that the explanation of the issue history in combination with the customer notificaiton rules can help you to identify this information.

Andy