Does Jira Service Desk work well for external software support?

Question

I work on the help desk for a software company. More specifically, I do external customer software support, not internal IT support.

We use Jira for bug tracking and want to integrate tech support with development. Right now we use Spiceworks for help desk tickets, but we are finding it's too limited to track everything we need for reporting, and it certainly doesn't integrate with our development bug tracking in Jira.

We need to categorize/tag tickets in a very robust way so that we can do analysis on hot-button issues, etc. It would also be useful to link a help desk ticket to a software bug so that we can close the loop with the customer once the bug is fixed. We also need very customizable reports.

Philippe Mesrit · Answer

The biggest problem that I've found is that you can't, unless I'm mistaken, group customers into a company.

I.e. you can't even say that Jim, Frank and Bob are in company A and Jill, Sam, and Hank are in company B.

That's a crticial requirement for us as well as the ability for Jim, Frank and Bob to see / comment on tickets that are within Company A.

Daniel Dougan · Answer

Thank you. I'd say we would be using whatever reports the system can output as long as they are understandable and we can run customized queries based on date, category, etc.

For example...how many tickets have we gotten about Login issues in a given month...by state where the user is located?

Timothy · Answer

Yes on "works well for external software support" and "close the loop with the customer once the bug is fixed".

On the reports side, depends on what type of reports you are using.