Eliminate Duplicates in Jira Service Desk with Ninjas

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Our customers love Jira Service Desk. It’s easy to use and powerful.

But it needs some care. If you work with JSD the following story might sound familiar to you.

Everything is fine in the beginning. Customer requests come in, you answer or solve them. But over time, your service desk is getting more and more polluted. Duplicates are becoming more common as multiple tickets on the same topic are created. 

Our customer Futureweb from Tirol, Austria has dealt with this problem. They design, create and host websites for companies and associations. You can imagine that this brings a lot of discussion about details with their customers. So duplicates are not uncommon for them.

Andreas from Futureweb established “ninjas” to eliminate them. And the weapon his ninjas use is our Marketplace app “Merge Agent for Jira”.

Futureweb works with two different queues. 

The team queue handles the oldest customer requests first - no matter how time-consuming the request is. The second queue is processed by a ninja - a role that alternates on a daily basis between three team members. The ninja pulls the latest tickets which can be solved quickly. 

And that's exactly where "Merge Agent for Jira" comes into play.

The ninja is usually the first one who views newly created tickets. Once she detects a duplicate, she merges it into the main ticket. This is how a duplicate gets eliminated.

Andreas mentioned different situations in which duplicates occur. Sometimes customers create new requests if they forgot to mention something in the original request. Or they send data and other attachments about one topic in multiple issues. In other cases the same question is sent twice by mistake.

So it depends on the ticket which content is merged with “Merge Agent for Jira”. Sometimes, the agent adds only the description to the target ticket. In other cases, all attachments are included when a merge is performed.

The ninja usually reacts very quickly to newly created tickets. So comments are merged in very rare cases.

When talking with Andreas we were impressed how clever and effective this process is. But - hey - this is no surprise when working with ninjas, is it?