Chat for Jira Service Desk with direct chat-to-issue feature. An alternative to other chat solutions

[#1]

Hi there!

Have you ever considered using chat agent to get closer to your customers on your website, landing pages for marketing campaigns or on your documentation?

All of you that were thinking about it might have tried different solutions.

Surprisingly, it looked like everything that MPAC offered, was just placing an IM widget on the issue page or the customer portal.

The chat conversations are processed on another platform without integration with JSD as issues. Nothing is stored in Jira.

We, as Spartez, were there as well - after months of testing, we finally decided to develop and offer our own solution.

We summarize our experience from the pain and launched Chat for Service Desk.

Why chat?

It looks like these days, customers prefer to use IM tools rather than email or ticket-based systems.

They want to talk to a real person in real time - clients don't want to go through hoops of setting up an account on a support system in order to contact the support. They want their problems to be solved in real-time by an actual human. 

When they are interested in buying your products or services, they don't want to send emails to a random address.

Part 1 - Testing existing solutions

There was no available solution that could integrate with Jira Service Desk, so we have tried some well-known solutions.

We have tried LiveChat first, since there is an app which integrates it with Confluence in the Marketplace.

But, as our clients are widely distributed in different countries and timezones, and our support team cannot be online 24/7. 

Therefore, notification feature for both our agents and clients is critical in our operation. Yet, LiveChat does not provide email-based notification. As a result, our clients do not know our replies if they have left the page already, and our agents do not receive any emails about incoming messages as well.

So we moved to Intercom instead.

It was better at first, but:

• We had to constantly look at the browser tab and check it, we weren't notified about the incoming messages when there are many opened tabs

• We didn't liked spamming emails and the poor email structure for notifications

• Reports were not good enough for us

To be honest - all those issues were nothing, really.
After a few months of testing, we finally discovered what the real problems are.

Part 2 - Realize what the real problems are

Our support team had to work in two different platforms - they had to handle standard support tickets via Jira Service Desk and handle live conversations on another platform (Intercom) at the same time. 

And guess what...

Very often, our support team was talking with the one single client on both channels. At the end, we had to add the Intercom conversation history to the corresponding JSD tickets for tracking purpose. We are sure it is not the best use of anyone's time.

Since the support tickets queue is spilt into two, it was much harder to maintain and prioritize. Some of our clients were not satisfied enough because the agent handled their JSD ticket is not the same as the one who handled their Intercom conversation. It created chaos in our support.

Unfortunately, the summary reports from Jira/JSD are completely different from those in Intercom. Therefore, it was impossible to summarize the support tickets and works from two different platforms in a unified way.

What we planned to provide as a better communication channel to our customers turned into nightmare for both our support and customers.

Part 3 - if you can't find an existing solution, build your own one!

After we realized the real problems, we finally decided to develop Chat for Service Desk.

The same as some of our apps, it  was born as an internal use app at first. We used our resources to create a solution which could satisfy our needs. Generally, we are not the only one who suffered the same, our solution may help you/others as well.

The needs are as follows:

• Easy to deploy
  • We want to have the chat widget everywhere possible (website, documentation, landing pages)
    

• Jira Service Desk integration

  • New chat conversation → a JSD issue
  • New message in the conversation → a comment the JSD issue
  • Agent's comment → a message in the conversation
  • Both customers and agents see the updated conversations/issues with no delays
  • Possibility to apply Jira/JSD features such as automation or canned responses
• No login required
  • The customer does not need to log in for starting a conversation.
  • They can chat anonymously. 
• Chat history
  • Customers can provide their email for registering on JSD
  • They can log in to their account via the widget in order to see the chat history
• Attachments & Emoji
  • Both agents and customers can upload attachments such as screenshots or files to the conversations/issues
  • Emoji supported
• Agents' availability
  • Customers will be notified if there are any agents online
  • Agents can select their online/offline hours by their needs
  • If no agents are online, clients will be notified that their inquiries will be handled when agents are back 
• Notification icon on JSD for agents
  • An icon on Jira board and JSD will be showing issues in queues.
  • The icon is updated in real-time so agents will not miss any incoming messages
  • An audio notification is supported as well

To sum up - when we were testing well-known solutions it becomes clear - there was no solution that could let the customer create an issue in JSD by just sending a message on the chat widget.

Now, Chat for Service Desk - Chats to Issues is finally launched - it becomes all better.

 

See how it works on Atlassian Marketplace or watch a video here.

Check out how per agent pricing works.

Let us know how you think and any of your needs by dropping us a comment here. 

[Deleted user]

Hi,

Is this addon compatible with Jira Service Desk (On Cloud)? I'm not able to find option to install this under Manage Add-ons. When I try to search in marketplace from within my Jira instance, it doesn't show up.

And yes, I'm admin for a trial Jira SD instance.

[Jacek Wizmur-Szymczak]

Hi @[deleted]! :)

Thanks for that question.

For now, Chat for Service Desk is available only on Jira Server. 

We're thinking about cloud version - we will start working on it after Atlassian Summit at Barcelona. 

[Reapit Service Desk]

Agree, a good solution is missing for Cloud versions.  Does this offering allow you to configure when Chat is 'Live / Closed' et al ?

[Janusz Gorycki]

Hi Richard,

Our Chat for Service Desk has a concept of "online/offline" agents. When all agents are offline, then the chat switches to "offline" mode automatically, meaning that from the point of view of the customer, the conversation becomes email-based and the customer is notified that they should expect a delayed response. Also, in "offline" mode, the customer is required to provide their email address (they cannot chat anonymously). You can read about this on our documentation page: https://confluence.spartez.com/display/CFSD/Agent+Online+Status

Best Regards
Janusz Gorycki, spartez.com

[Harel Safra]

Hi,

Do you have a plan for JSD cloud support? We would be interested in that.

Harel 

[Jacek Wizmur-Szymczak]

Hi @Harel Safra!

Thanks for your interest in Chat for Jira Service Desk.

Answering your question - We have just released DC version of the app and we’re thinking about developing cloud version as well.

For now, we have other priorities like f.e. knowledge base integration that is going to be delivered soon.

We will publish Chat roadmap to let you know what are the next steps for this application.

Stay tuned!

[Marcin Owczarek]

Hi There,

JSD cloud support would be highly appreciated and required.

Thanks for consideration.

[Abhi Gudidevuni]

Hi There,

The Jira Service Desk integration features state you can :

• Start a New chat conversation → which would create a new JSD issue
• New message in the existing conversation → would create a comment in the JSD issue

Just wondering if a "New" chat session could be initiated to an existing JSD issue? We would would like to give our customers visibility of their service requests (existing JSD issues) in our customer portal, in many cases the issue creation source is not chat.  We would like to give customers an option to initiate a chat session to an existing JSD's visible to them in the portal.  

Appreciate you time.

[Piotr Stefaniak]

Hello @Abhi Gudidevuni ,

Currently our Chat for Jira Service Desk has no capability of initiating chat sessions for the existing (non-chat originated) JSD tickets. Though, your particular use case seems to me a meaningful one. We should add that to our feature backlog, but honestly I wouldn't expect that to be implemented soon (if at all).

Regards,
Piotr Stefaniak / spartez.com

[Jessie]

+1 on creating a cloud version - this is exactly the plugin I am looking for. No real solutions for this functionality for cloud users whatsoever. 

[Jack Brickey]

Indeed interested in Cloud in a major way. But also pushing for Atlassian to build it in natively. IMO, that would be huge at unseating some of the competition.

[Jacek Wizmur-Szymczak]

Hi @Jessie  and @Jack Brickey ,

Thanks for commenting and showing interest in our Chat :).

Just to provide some update - unfortunately, for now, nothing has changed.  We are not working on Cloud version of Chat for Jira Service Desk, but if something will change, I'll make an update here.

Best, 

Jacek

[Michiel Schuijer]

Hi, in our org more and more Service Desk projects are starting to use your Chat tool since it's available anyway and a quick chat can solve a lot of issues without the need of filling in an entire issue screen.

However, once the agent comes to the conclusion more time/work is needed to fulfill the request it becomes necessary to work from a regular (non-chat) request type, and an action is needed to start a new request.

There is the built-in Jira feature to 'create a linked issue' but that does not transfer all fields/history you (may) want to transfer and it will be an internal issue, not a Service Desk request type and it does copy the label "created-from-chat" over to the linked Jira issue which you don't want because that is used to show such an issue in the chat queue.

The alternative "Move" is also unacceptable because you lose the chat conversation and will confuse the customer with that most likely and has the same drawback as creating a linked issue: it becomes an internal Jira issue, not a Service Desk request type so you can't share it with the customer until you set a couple of fields manually to other values (Request Type, Reporter, Summary, Description).

Can you come up with an easy solution, a one-click button where you are presented with the option to for the Service Desk Agent to choose a Request Type and which fields to copy/fill in or something smart like that, just for that scenario?

You probably have encountered this yourself as I myself started a chat with you guys and got the email and comment "Hello! Looks like all of our agents are busy at the moment, but don't worry. We got your message and will get back to you as soon someone is available." and you may need to send this question to your R&D team for later.

Thanks for your consideration.

Kind regards

[Kit Tin Mak]

Hi Michiel,

We noticed that you have reached out to us also via our support channel, and we are answering your questions via support.

From your use case, usually how we do is to have a Jira dashboard with different JQL results. Whenever an issue needs to be escalated or moved from Chat to some other request type, we just change the request type and could be issue type as well with some labels. Then, we use these fields and labels to differentiate the real Chat (live) issues and issues that might require extra works on.

Please be aware that customers will still be able to use Chat Widget to communicate with you even if you changed the request type or issue type.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us at https://support.spartez.com/

Cheers,

Kit

Senior Support Engineer

Spartez Software

[apadilla]

Another request for JSD Cloud support.

I’m sure the level of interest and need in the cloud space is greater you think. 

Looking forward to seeing a roadmap.

[Agnieszka Jozwiak _Appfire_]

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick info that Chat for Jira Service Desk is now available on Cloud. More details here.

Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions. Our Support Team is ready to answer them all.

Best,

Agnes