Ticket loops with other ITSM systems

Question

Hi,

We have an issue that I'm fairly certain can't be all that uncommon.

We have recently started using Jira Service Management when communicating with our customers. A lot of our customers have ITSM systems of their own, some of them use ServiceNow for example.

So a typical scenario for us is that we send them an email from the same email address as our Jira SM is ingesting from. This creates a ticket in their ServiceNow, let's call it "INC00001".

They then send us an email from ServiceNow, which creates a ticket in our Jira SM. Lets call this ticket JSM-01.

When we reply in JSM-01, the subject line of the response will be something like "JSM-01 - INC00001", which is not recognized by ServiceNow, probably because our ticket prefix is in the beginning of the subject line. So it creates a new ticket for them called "INC00002 - JSM-01 - INC00001". And it kind of spirals out of control from there.

This obviously causes a lot of irritation. Has anyone been in the same situation? Has this been solved before?

Rebekka Heilmann (viadee) · Answer

I think, that either of you needs to change their Email-Template. In JSM you cannot change the Algorithm of how Jira recognizes replies, you can only switch between replies popping up as new issues or comments.

Not sure if ServiceNow matches Emails to Issues if the ID is only in the Email Body, but that would be worth a try.

However, you can't have different templates for different recipients.

David Andersson_jyhsmw · Answer

Well, we want an issue raised in our system when they contact us.

We are a managed service provider and when we need to contact one of our customers, we do so via email.

So at the moment, it looks something like this:

support@mycompany.com ---email sent---> servicenow@customer.com (ticket created, INC00001)

servicenow@customer.com (from INC00001) ---email sent---> support@mycompany.com (ingested by Jira, issue JSM-01 created)

support@mycompany.com (from JSM-01) ---email sent---> servicenow@customer.com (new ticket created, INC00002)

Here, the customer obviously gets confused. They now have two tickets in their ServiceNow regarding the same thing. And if they respond to our last email, in their newly created INC00002. It will create a new issue in our Jira Service Management instance, JSM-02.

Rebekka Heilmann (viadee) · Answer

Do you want an issue raised in your Service Desk, when you are opening a request in their system? In your example, JSM-01.

If not, you could put their ServiceNow Email-Adress on a blacklist so it doesn't create issues. Unless they use that Email-Adress to actually open issues as well ;)  Or you could use a different E-Mail Adress to open issues in their system.

All in All - it depends on in how many interactions this is happening and how you want to keep informed on your tickets' status.