Email only tickets, with threads and multipe CCs

Sergio Scabuzzo October 17, 2020

Hi all,

 

I've been using the Service Desk for a while now and keep getting complains from customers about emails not threading and CCs not working as expected in emails (I don't have much info on the CC part).

 

My question:

Is it possible to have some clients ONLY use email for tickets, while preserving threads? I can manage the tickets on the dashboard, but they wouldn't need to interact with it at all (if they don't want to).

Right now, I'm getting issues where my replies (from within Jira) start a new email.

 

Any input on if it's possible and what I may need to do to set this up correctly would be awesome!

Sergio

2 answers

0 votes
Angélica Luz
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 19, 2020

Hello Sergio,

Thank you for reaching out to Atlassian Community!

When a customer replies to a notification and a new ticket is created instead of adding a comment, it means that the customer who replied doesn't have permission on the ticket.

For them to be able to comment, they must be a participant and if they are not being automatically added as participants when the email is sent, it means that the configuration on your site doesn't allow customers to create their own accounts.

In order to automatically add CC as participants, you need to change the following settings:

Go to Project settings > Customer permissions (Classic project) or Service Desk Settings > Channels > Customer permissions (Next-gen project).

Screen Shot 2020-10-19 at 17.49.33.png

On Who can access the portal, select "Anyone with an account" and also Who can customers share requests with?, select "Any customer or organization" > Save.

After that, go to Cog icon > Products > Under service desk, select Configuration.

On "Can customers create their own accounts?", select "Yes, by signing up or sending a request".

Screen Shot 2020-10-19 at 17.54.44.png

Please, give it a try and let us know how it goes.

Regards,
Angélica

Sergio Scabuzzo October 19, 2020

Amazing! I'll give this a shot, but first I have a question.

I have this service desk setup for all organizations I work with. So if I set Who can customers share requests with, to what you suggested, it will allow all of the organizations to see all of the  customers, right? Would setting Any customer in the project, by manually entering an email address work just as well?

I also currently have Can customers access and send request from the help center without logging in, to yes. Is that okay for this functionality?

Or do I have to setup a service desk per organization in order to have them not see each other?

Angélica Luz
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 21, 2020

Yes, when selecting the option for them to share the ticket with any customer or organization, they will be able to see all customers in that project in case they use the option "Share" to add participants or if there is a user picker field in the forms.

If you don't select this option, they won't be able to share the ticket with people that don't have an account. 

Regarding the second option, yes, you can both allow customers to login or not to create requests. The important one for this case is to allow them to create their own accounts.

Having different project for organizations won't work for this case, because once you select the option "Anyone can send requests" on Customer permissions, it will open the project to anyone with an account on the site to create tickets, so all customers will be listed on all projects that have this option enabled.

Sergio Scabuzzo October 22, 2020

Great! I'll run some tests now.

There is no way to have the settings you suggest and allow visitors to the portal to add multiple recipients and not have them see all other users? Seems a security issue, if that's the case.

Also strange that it still shows all users across different projects(?).

 

If this is the case, I guess the only solution is to not allow the portal form to add participants?

Like Rafa likes this
Angélica Luz
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 26, 2020

Hi Sergio,

It's not a security issue because it mentions the behavior in the settings. 

Also strange that it still shows all users across different projects(?).

Yes, that option will allow anyone with an account on the site to create tickets in the project and it includes all customers and also internal licensed users.

If this is the case, I guess the only solution is to not allow the portal form to add participants?

It's an option but then duplicated tickets will be created because customers will forward the email to people that don’t have permission to add comments on the ticket. 

You can let the customers know that it's important that they don't forward the notification and maybe add a comment to the ticket with the email of the person asking for an agent to add them as participants.

Sergio Scabuzzo November 15, 2020

Thank you for all your help. I set things as you mentioned, but I'm still having two issues that don't seem to allow clients to only use email as communication:

When an email comes in, it changes the title from "Title", to "SERVICEPROJECT-123 Title". This breaks the original thread. Is there any way to keep the original title?

Also, when a client CCs somebody on the original email it seems to work, up until the client replies to me, that reply does not seem to go to the CCd person.

 

I'm really trying here and would love to finally move to using Jira full time, but I can't seem to work out these kinks. I'd like clients to have nothing to do with the back end and only use email and for it to be seamless for them. I would then use all the great features on the backend...

Thanks for your help and patience with this.

Angélica Luz
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 16, 2020

Hi Sergio,

Do you mean that the title of the new ticket shows different or the title of the original ticket changes?

Can you share a screenshot of the issue with us?

If the customer CC someone when replying to a notification, the CCd person will be added as a participant, so it will work. What they can't do is forward the notification to the person and if they reply to the forwarded notification, it will create a new ticket.

Sergio Scabuzzo November 22, 2020

Hi, looks like my last reply didn't make it through... Ooops.

Issue is when a client sends an email and CCs a guest, the guest gets the original email (let's title it Support) from the client. But then both get an email titled with the service project name plus ticket number (so "SERVICEPROJECT-123 Support" would be an example. This causes confusion when sending tickets from emails.

Also the individual emails being sent from Jira to guest or client, only contain the email before it on the content. It would be great if I could have the emails sent, contain the whole thread, as if they were regular emails and Jira not show that on the ticket when viewing it from the dashboard.

Here is what one of my clients says:

  • When I reply to one of these emails it starts a brand new email so only the most recent email I am responding to at the top of the thread shows. So I usually forget what we were talking about and need to go back and re-read the entire thread to get back up to speed, but unfortunately with your system you can’t do that so I end have to go digging for the original email to figure out what we had agreed upon and said which is cumbersome.
  • When I reply to an email it is unclear if the original CC’d and BCC’d people are still on the thread, it is just addressed to the support email. So it appears that all the original people on the thread are dropped when one responds every time… not sure if this is a correct assumption? But I usually have go back, find out who was on the thread and re-BCC/CC them. Also cumbersome - and possibly redundant?
  • Notification updates for tasks: I usually end up taking myself off any notification emails because they are just not helpful. The notification email has no information other then someone responded to someone else. It is another barrier to have to log in to the support platform to go see what the conversation was about. I would rather get a notification with the conversation so I can skip the step of having to go retrieve it from the support platform.

Essentially I would like to have the ticketing system be as invisible as possible to clients (since they only communicate through email) and allow for me to use all the amazing features on the back end.

Angélica Luz
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 24, 2020

Thank you for the details, Sergio.

1. When I reply to one of these emails it starts a brand new email so only the most recent email I am responding to at the top of the thread shows.  

The notifications only contain the information about each event, it's not possible to configure it to show all the history the same as the customer portal.

There is a feature suggesting the implementation of this ability:

2. When I reply to an email it is unclear if the original CC’d and BCC’d people are still on the thread, it is just addressed to the support email. 

The only way to confirm if they are receiving the notifications is by checking the "Share with" field in the portal. If they are listed there, they will receive the public updates of the ticket.

3. I would rather get a notification with the conversation so I can skip the step of having to go retrieve it from the support platform.

This would be the same as the first one where we need the feature to be implemented for customers to receive the entire history in one notification.

Sergio Scabuzzo November 24, 2020

Voted up! Thanks :)

So all this talk of threading was only for notifications to the client, that include the last action... This means there is no way for me to use Jira Service Management as an email only ticketing system. Not until the feature you mentioned is implemented, right? Or am I missing something?

I was starting to look at Main Handlers, but not sure it's even relevant...

Screenshot_20201124_092151.png

Thanks for all your help with this! I really appreciate it.

Angélica Luz
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 25, 2020

That's correct, Sergio.

As a workaround, you can use an add-on that has more functionalities and it probably has an option to send a notification showing the entire history. 

The mail handlers from the screenshot you sent are used for Software and Business projects.

Sergio Scabuzzo December 24, 2020

Thanks for all your patience and input. I now see more clearly how this works. It's really designed to work from the dashboard and not from emails. The email component is just to let clients know there was some interaction...

With that though, I still can't use the service desk because I need to be able to have CC'd people interact with the tickets and keep my other client names private, since I have many different orgs I work with.

Not sure there is a solution for me here... Any further input would be great.

0 votes
Carlos Garcia Navarro
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
October 17, 2020

Hi @Sergio Scabuzzo ,

Regarding the (not) threading, did you confirm that the issue key is in the email subject?

Could this issue be related to this Atlassian ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-3757 ?

Sergio Scabuzzo October 18, 2020

Hi, and yup. The issue key is on the email subject (I didn't know you could remove it). I commented on that issue you linked to, though I'm sure it's not much more than a "bump" comment.

 

I am seeing it threading on my email support@domain.com, I'll have to dig deeper with clients. But I do want to confirm that this is possible, while including CCs that are not users.

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