Forward ticket to external helpdesk

Koen van Besien

I was trialling Service Desk and had following requirement:

 

* Internal user sends email to helpdesk 

* Ticket is created

* Agent looks at it and sees, ok its a ticket for our third party supplier. 

* Agent forwards the ticket to the external supplier email address

* External supplier email system comes back with a ticket number

* Agent replies and goes back and forth with external supplier

* When issue is solved with external supplier comment is given to internal customer 

* If all good agent closes internal ticket.

 

I cannot really find a way how to deal with this using Jira service desk as there seems to be no forward ticket to email option?

Jack Brickey

@Koen van Besien, the key is in your 4th bullet. What do you really want to do relative to forwarding the ticket. There are various approaches to incorporating third-parties into your ticket resolution process. You can give the third-parties user accounts w/in JIRA with certain permissions that meet your needs or you can keep them completely out of the application in which case you would need another method to communicate, e.g. email. I'm not a fan of email as it makes things very manual. I would be more in favor of incorporating the third-party into JSD or JSW.

If we consider the options for incorporating them into JSD/JSW then consider how much you want to expose them to or give them access too. Here are some options:

• make them Agents of the project. This gives them full access to all issues in that project. Likely not what you want but it is nice a clean implementation. In this way you can use Components to capture the third-party and have the issues default to the third-party agent when the component is set, but there are other options here too.
• Create a separate project for the third-party, making them agents there and then from the original internal project create a linked issue in the third parties project. In this scenario the third-party has visibility and control on only their issues. You can even use Automation function to transition the original if desired which can help alert the internal project agent to take an action, e.g. close the original and add comment.
• similar to the second bullet but make the third party a Customer instead of an agent. the only advantage here is to control cost. In this scenario the third-party can't be assigned the issue and is limited to comments only so your agent will need to own the issue to closure.

hopefully these thought help you consider the best approach. BTW, you can add a custom field in in case and include the third-parties customer ticket number for reference.