Automation Request: Add 'Reply to Customer' Comment if None Exists After 6 Hours of Issue Creation

Question

Dear All,

We are currently receiving customer issues through the Jira Help Center.

Our customers expect to receive a response via the “Reply to Customer” comment within 24 hours of issue creation, indicating that their issue has been acknowledged.

While we aim to manually reply within 24 hours, there is a possibility that a comment to the customer might be missed. Therefore, we would like to implement the following automation rule:

Trigger Conditions:

* The issue status is “Open.”

* There is no comment of type “Reply to Customer” on the issue.
(Even if there are internal comments, the trigger should activate if no customer-facing reply exists.)

Action:

* A predefined message will be added as a “Reply to Customer” comment.

Automation Timing:

* Ideally, the rule should trigger for issues that have been open for 6 hours since creation.

* If this is difficult to implement, we would also be fine with running the trigger check at a specific time each day.

Thank you.

-----------------------------------

Hi, Walter Buggenhout.

Internally, we aim to leave comments within 6 hours.
Our team members are working with that goal in mind, but to address occasional human errors, we’ve been considering implementing automation.

We apologize if this has caused any discomfort.

Also, the point you raised is absolutely valid.
We will take this opportunity to revisit and reflect on our internal processes.

Thank you.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Sangyoon Kim (Logan)

Just following up to check if this answered your question.  If so, please consider marking this one as "answered".  That will help others with a similar need find solutions faster.  If not, please let the community know what help you need with the rule changes.

Thanks!

Kind regards,
Bill

Rick Westbrock · Answer

I agree about not using an automatic comment to appear as if an agent added the comment. You can configure an SLA for the six hour mark and configure it to notify the assignee when it is nearing breach. You should also be able to configure an automation rule to e-mail a Manager when an unassigned ticket is nearing breach.

If the primary problem is that agents transition a ticket but forget to add a customer facing comment then you can create an automation rule to e-mail the customer during that transition but that would cause two e-mails if the agent does remember to add a customer comment. If you implement this type of automation rule then you could train the agents that they no longer need to add a customer comment that simply notes that a human has started working the ticket.

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Sangyoon Kim (Logan) and welcome to the Community!

Not that I don't want to answer your question, but have you considered what problem you are trying to solve here?

If you want to make sure you send a comment to the customer to acknowledge that the ticket was received (as a means of telling them their request has properly landed in your service desk), it would make more sense to send that message immediately (and automatically) as soon as the ticket is created. You can use standard customer notifications on issue created in JSM to do so.

I your goal is to let your customers know that the ticket has actually been reviewed by a human, then don't automatically add a comment pretending as if you did that. It is misleading to your customer and it does not guarantee in any way that the ticket has been reviewed - it might even lead to a situation where your agents might overlook the tickets altogether, leading to a poor service experience for your customers.

As a workaround, you might want to built a step into your ticket workflow to indicate an agent has actually started working on the ticket (e.g. Intake or something like that). Doing so will also make it a lot easier to find new tickets that haven't been reviewed, as you can than simply query for tickets that were created X hours ago and still are in their initial status.

Hope this helps!