Multi-level support ticket categories?

Question

Hello,

I've been put in charge of moving or small, but vital support organisation from our current ticketing system over to JIRA.

To be honest, I'm having some trouble even navigating around JIRA. I'm looking for a way of creating ticket support categories, but I can't find A) if this is doable in JIRA or B)  if so, how...

What we need is basically a hierarchy of categories, like for instance:

1st-line Support -> App -> User registration

1st-line Support -> App -> General usage -> Android

2nd-line Support -> Admin -> Adding users

2nd-line Support -> Installation -> Configuration

How can I facilitate this in JIRA? What app do I use? JIRA or JSM? Other?

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Accepted Answer

Hi @Ricky Blunda welcome to the community

For a support organisation, Jira Service Management (JSM) is the right product. It's built specifically for support teams with a customer portal, request types, and queues.

For multi-level categories, the native approach is to use a Cascading Select custom field, which gives you two levels (e.g. Category > Subcategory). You'd add this field to your work item layout and agents can select the appropriate category when working on a ticket.

The limitation is that native cascading selects only support two levels. For three levels like your examples, you'd either use two separate fields (e.g. one for the support line + area, another for the specific topic), or look at a marketplace app that supports deeper hierarchy.

For the 1st-line vs 2nd-line split, that's better handled through separate queues or assignment rules based on the category selected, rather than trying to encode it into the category itself.

Hope that gives you a useful starting point feel free to ask if you want to dig into any of these in more detail!

Probably also others will have good Ideas for you.

One important detail: we can give you some advice, but the better approach is to first define the concept you want to build and then shape JSM around it, because JSM gives you a lot of flexibility for customization.

Nikola Perisic · Accepted Answer

Hello @Ricky Blunda

You would use JSM and also modify the request groups where as the end result you would get this:

For your request types, you need to create new ones that would look like this:

Direct hierarchy except work item hierarchy that is applied across whole Jira doesn't exist in JSM. This would be the workaround.

arti_b_patil · Accepted Answer

hey Ricky,
category depends on what you want to achieve.
If your organization have team need external users to raise request, also to have dedicated list of questions/ details required then JSM is your tool.
JSM supports all your ITSM related activities. You can implement same in Jira as well but it will not have all required features that any organization need to track ITSM process.

On your 2nd query, if given list of options are more like services request then you can use approach given by Nikola Perisic in answers.
however, if those are fields or say a response user can fill while creating a request then go with approach shared in 1st answer by Arkadiusz Wroblewski, to use cascading custom fields.