Work with customers on requests in Jira Service Management
10 min
Beginner
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Find information in the detail view
- Use comments to communicate with customers
- Resolve requests
How do customers create requests?
In Jira Service Management, your work items represent requests from customers. But, customers may have many different kinds of requests. Your team will use request types to configure different behaviors for these requests and track them separately.
👉 For example: The Legal team uses two request types: Hiring review and Contract review. The team can set up these request types differently because they need to collect different information and have different approvers for these requests.
Customers will see request types as different options they can choose in the portal. When they’re filling out the request, they may have to enter different fields based on the request type they chose. Fields contain information about a request.
Both customers and service team members use fields, but the service team will likely see more fields than the customer can.
👉 For example: Ernesto, a customer, submits a request for help troubleshooting a technical problem. While submitting his request, he fills out fields like Impact and URL. In the service project, Ernesto’s request is assigned to Alex. Alex reads all of the information, then sets the Effort field to two out of ten. This indicates to Alex’s service team that the effort it takes to solve that work item is relatively small. Ernesto doesn’t see this field on his view of the request as it isn’t relevant information.
If you click on a work item in your service project, you’ll view the details of the work item and it's fields.
👇 Click the boxes below to learn about some important fields in Jira Service Management.
Your specific fields depend on how your team configures your project. Check with your team lead to understand which fields you should use.
Communicate with customers on work items
When you’re assigned to a work item, you’ll communicate back-and-forth with your customer to fulfill their request.
👇Click the tabs below to learn how you can communicate on work items.
You'll use comments all the time to communicate with customers and your team. Use external comments to share progress, answer questions, and propose solutions. Add internal comments to loop in your team.
Click Reply to customer to post an external comment the customer can see. Click Add internal note to add an internal comment that only your team can see, not your customer.
Resolve customer work items
As soon as a customer submits a request, that work item's workflow begins. A workflow is the path a work item takes from creation to completion. Each step in the workflow is represented in Jira Service Management by a status. Workflows and statuses help you and the customer understand what work has been done and what work remains to fulfill a request.
👉 For example: The “Waiting for customer” status indicates that the service agent is waiting for more information or action from the customer before they can fulfill the request.
To view the workflow for a work item:
- From the work item view, click the status dropdown.
- Click View workflow.
👇This is how you view the workflow for a work item.
Customers may see different statuses on their request than agents do internally, depending on how your admin configures your workflow.
When you've fulfilled your customer’s request, you’ll move the work item to the last status in the workflow, usually Resolved or Done. Make sure the customer is satisfied with your solution before moving the work item to the final status. Customers can also close their own tickets by changing the status.