Our customers are not licensed JIRA users, hence their access is limited to just submitting a ticket through the Customer Portal and receiving automated notifications via e-mail.
For our escalation process, since customers do not have a way to open the ticket and directly make changes to the status, we have utilized our mailboxes to accommodate escalations.
The current workflow is that we only accept a request coursed through email via the dedicated mailboxes per project if its purpose is to escalate an existing ticket within the service desk (otherwise, it won't be entertained/looked into) — this is communicated via our internal documentations and incorporated in our notifications. Now, when a ticket comes in via e-mail, it is automatically in an "Escalated" status, while containing the information of the original ticket being escalated. This would then allow agents to tag the original ticket to "Escalated" triggering the right notifications and alerting the right team/resources.
The workaround is working as expected so far. However, we have received comments/suggestions if it would be possible to not create a second ticket when escalations are raised. We do not see this as a possibility unless we provide licenses to all our customers — which isn't an option, or if we structure our escalation in a more manual fashion.
Is there a way to merge tickets? My thought is to have our escalation ticket triggers (requests that come in via-email) automatically linked to an existing ticket depending on certain criteria we specify. I have explored the "Automation" tab under "Project Settings" however, the conditions seem very limited to roll-out what I have in mind.
