Improve your ITSM customer experience
10 min
Intermediate
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Make it easy for customers to submit requests through email and Slack
- Present customers with the correct information using screens, forms, and a knowledge base
- Prioritize customer experience with surveys and SLAs
Make it easy to submit requests with the portal, email, and Slack
Customize the customer portal
Project admins can customize the portal from project settings to make it a better experience for customers. They can:
- Rename the customer portal
- Add a logo
- Add introduction text to familiarize customers with the service project
- Select a language preference for their portal and notifications
- Allow agents to add announcements
Create requests using email
Some customers might prefer to email the service desk to open a request. Project admins can set up email requests under project settings. You can automatically save emails between agents and customers to the request as comments.
Here’s how sending requests by email works:
- A customer emails a request to the service project’s email address. The request becomes a ticket in the service project and is added to a queue.
- An agent comments on the ticket.
- The customer receives an email notification that contains the agent's comment.
- The customer replies to the email notification and the reply displays as a comment on the ticket in the service project.
Set up chat in Slack using the Atlassian Assist app
Project admins can connect the service project to Slack through an app called Atlassian Assist. Customers can ask for help in chat and turn messages into tickets. Agents can create work items, respond, update fields, assign work, approve, decline, close requests, and more.
👉 For example: An automation can send a Slack message every morning, informing the team of any requests that haven’t been commented on in over a week.
Inform customers with screens, forms, knowledge bases, notifications, and Statuspage
Configure screens to collect information
In company-managed service projects, Jira admins can configure screens on workflow transitions to collect additional data as tickets progress through their lifecycle.
👉 For example: When agents transition a ticket to In Progress, a screen asks the agent to select the assignee.
Agents and customers don't see the same screens. The agent’s screen has all the fields needed to manage the ticket, while the customer’s screen in the portal only includes a subset of those fields.
Streamline requests with forms
Project admins can add forms to their projects to standardize customer requests. Forms are especially useful for ensuring that support teams have all the required information to triage, prioritize, and resolve requests effectively.
👉 For example: An agent can provide a customer with a form to gather more information, such as screenshots, log files, or error reproduction steps for an existing ticket.
You can add forms to request types, tickets, and the portal for sending emails.
Keep request forms simple, so they’re easy for customers to complete.
Let customers self-serve information in a knowledge base
A Confluence knowledge base can reduce the number of requests raised in a service project. Customers automatically get related knowledge base articles when they start filling out a request form.
👉 For example: When customers type “iPhone” in the summary field, they’ll see related articles. They can review the article and find the answer to their question rather than creating a support ticket.
👇 The suggested articles appear below the summary.
This improves customer satisfaction and reduces repetitive inquiries for the technical teams. Agents can also see related knowledge base articles in their tickets that can help them resolve the ticket.
Configure customer notifications
Project admins can configure external notifications that automatically send to customers based on different activities. There are templates that project admins can customize.
👉 For example: You can send a customer a notification that you’ve received their request and provide a link to view it.
Integrate with Statuspage to share incidents
You can integrate Statuspage with your service project to communicate incidents, outages, and scheduled maintenance directly in the customer portal.
👉 For example: If the hardware team plans to conduct maintenance on the email server this weekend, you can add this to the home page of the portal. Customers can see outage information before and during scheduled maintenance.
Prioritize customer experience with surveys and SLAs
Enable customer satisfaction surveys
Project admins can configure their service projects to send customers a quick survey when their request is resolved. This helps track the ratings and comments in a customer satisfaction report for future improvements.
Only the customer who created the ticket will receive the survey. They can enter a rating and a comment. Project admins can configure the prompt text in the survey.
👇Here are some examples of feedback from the customer survey.
Set up proactive service support with SLAs
Project admins can set time goals with service-level agreements (SLAs) to drive better service quality across the project team. An SLA has two components: a time metric and a goal.
The time metric works like a stopwatch, tracking the time between two points in a work item's lifecycle.
👉 For example: An agent might start time when a work item is created, pause time while they wait for the customer to respond, and stop time when the work item is resolved.
The goal defines time metric targets for resolving certain work items. You can set different goals for different work item sets, grouping work by values like priority or with complex JQL statements.
👉 For example: You can set up SLAs so that:
- All tickets to order and set up laptops for new employees should be closed within one week.
- All P1s must be resolved within 15 minutes.