Can I use Service Desk for first level support and hand over unresolved issues to team projects?

Question

Hi community,

we would like to use JIRA Service Desk as the IT helpdesk in our company. All incidents shall be reported in this service desk project. It is required that all incidents which can not be resolved immediately by the first level support should be handed over to the second level support.

At this point it is also required that the second level support has to communicate directly with the customer and the first level support is not required anymore.

My thought was to use a different software project for each admin team (network, client service, …). Incidents which can not be resolved by the first level should then be handed over with ‘create linked issue’ to the network team project, for example. The network team is then able to organize all network incidents and tasks by its own in their own project.

The network team then talks with the user, fixes the issue, closes the task in the network project and the issue in the service desk should then be closed automatically.

All emails to and from the customer need to be in the network project task as comment.

So, my questions are:

Is this possible?

How can I communicate with the user as second level support using emails? The mention feature is not comfortable. Is the any other way to send emails?

Creating a linked issue will change the 'reporter' to the first level user. How can I set the customer as reporter?

Thank you in advance.

Regards,

Tim

Andy Heinzer · Answer

When other (team) users are able to add comments which can customer see, how can a (team) user be assigned to a Service Desk issue without being a Service Desk user?

They can't actually do that.  In order to be assigned to an issue that exists in a JSD project, that user has to be a JSD Agent, which will consume one user license seat for JSD.   The ability for Jira Software and Jira Core users to comment internally to a JSD ticket is only possible when those users are assigned a software or Core license seat, and their comments are limited to the internal kind.  They cannot post a public reply to the customer in that case.

This is also explained in Setting up Service Desk Users.

I understand if the end goal here is to limit the number of JSD agent licenses needed, but if that user is expected to be interacting directly with the customers, the expectation is that this user will need to be a JSD Agent.

unknown · Answer

Hi Andrew,

thanks for your reply.

I thought about a possibility to delegate the issues to different teams where they are able to organize their ticket by their own.

The side effect would by to minimize the needed Service Desk licenses.

When other (team) users are able to add comments which can customer see, how can a (team) user be assigned to a Service Desk issue without being a Service Desk user?

Andy Heinzer · Answer

The main problem with this approach is that if you move a service desk issue into a software project, the Service Desk customer won't be able to see that issue.   Service Desk customers are unlicensed users in Jira.  Which means you can have an unlimited number of customers, but those users are restricted to the customer portal, and creating/interacting specifically with their own Service Desk issues.   You can technically move that issue to a non-Service Desk project, but doing so will prevent that customer from seeing that issue or being able to interact with it at all.

Instead I would recommend just leaving that issue in that project and when you have to move to that second level of support, change the assignee of the issue to that new support person.   This way that support person can still continue to work with that customer directly in that ticket.

If needed, you can have Jira Software/Core users also add internal comments to existing JSD issues, so that might be helpful in cases like this where development teams might need to ask for more information or write up a comment for the support agent to help that customer.

In turn I think this would help provide a more seamless experience for the customer.

If you want to create another issue in another project and then link all the JSD issues about a specific problem to that Jira Software ticket, that certainly makes more sense to do in terms of tracking problems.  But the difference here is keeping in mind what kind of experience the customer has in regards to their interactions with your support team through Jira.