Is JIRA (Service Desk) suitable for end customer support?

wishbase May 7, 2014

We want to use JIRA Service Desk for our end customer support, where we, on one hand, may get kind of pre-sales inquiries via E-Mail; and support inquiries from existing users of our platform.

However, JIRA users are a "rare good" and I don't think it's meant to have a JIRA user for every such (end) customer.

How can these cases be handled? I already found https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Creating+Issues+and+Comments+from+Email, especially the section "To allow JIRA to handle email messages sent from people without a JIRA user account:"at the very bottom; however in that case I lose every information about the initial sender. No sender name, no E-Mail-Address available.

So: is JIRA Service Desk generally meant for such a scenario?

Thanks and best,

Adrian

2 answers

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Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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May 7, 2014

As Timothy says, Service Desk is meant for the internal case, unless you have no monetary contraints ;)

What you need is an external Mali Handler for JIRA OnDemand, that supports the concept of a remote email only user. JEMH is one of those (for Download), there is an OnDemand version of this being written right now, we're dogfooding it on our support line at the moment, availability is likely a beta trial in June/July, watch JEMH-2370 for updates.

James Flavell May 13, 2014

Excellent!!!!

I have been going round in circles trying to figure out ways to get JIRA OnDemand to be able to do this basic help desk function (and screaming Why is JEMH not availble ;) ) and was about to give up and move on to some other cloud solution due to the complete lack of interest in making a decent email handler and email formating by Atlassian for the OnDemand solution.


Now I will hold off and wait and see. I just hope your pricing will be workable for me.

Many thanks

James

Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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May 13, 2014

The whole SAAS pricing structure is tricky to guage, and even trickier to implement as there is not much flexibility within the atlassian ondemand pricing structure for addon specific price scaling related to usage other than 'users'. This actually introduces scenarios like what to do when a user exceeds plan limits, and realistically how to handle or bill for extra headroom, as with email integration, clearly, just turning it off really doesnt work too well, for example:

Would you rather:

  1. pay more to get higher data limits, or
  2. be ok with cessation/severe throttling of service during a calendar month due to exceeding those limits?

After all it really does need to cover costs, this stuff isn't cheap to develop or run ;)

Looking at things like JIRA Agile pricing for ondemand will give you an idea, though nothing is set in concrete, as with email handling there is much more processing and IO involved.

The documentation effort is about to get started, so pretty soon there will be something to see on the JEMHOD space.

James Flavell May 14, 2014

Thanks Andy and I can understand

I honestly would not expect my situation to be data intensive but if I was in that situation I would of course prefer to have an extra charge kick in if I exceed some quota (e.g. just like mobile data billing where usually you have a monthly limit and over that there is some additional charge)

I would not want to be paying higher out of the box just to cover the what-if situation because I would not expect to be getting to that point)

Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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May 14, 2014

Hey James,

I agree, but the existing OnDemand pricing model does not support that, so there may not be an option. I hope to get some direction from Atlassian via https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/browse/AMKT-9903;)

James Flavell July 26, 2014

Hi Andy,

Just checking whether you are any closer to a solution (both pricing wise and product wise) :)

I recall you mentioned hopefully by end July there might be a beta available so looking forward to hopefully seeing it soon

Thanks

James

Andy Brook
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July 27, 2014

Hi James,

Yes, to both counts:

Pricing; for want of a better model to follow JEMHCloud will probably start with a Cloud pricing model the same as Agile.

Beta timing; yes, end of this meek is planned for start of beta, some last minute performance changes are going into minimise downtime later.

Seeing it; well, you can drop support@thepluginpeople.coma line you'll be handled via JEMHCloud hooked up to our JIRACloud instance. What you can see from that would be the customization of layout, css and images.

Features currently not yet there are Directives, we hope to have that done by end of beta (planning August for that, with live in September, just ready for Summit!)

Service Desk Recap

Just to touch on ServiceDesk though, there are plans afoot for support of email only users within ServiceDesk. Innevitable for sure. Meantime JEMHCloud will be targetting the value-add angle and of course, for those not wanting to use ServiceDesk for whatever reason.

Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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July 27, 2014

Hi James,

Yes, to both counts:

Pricing; for want of a better model to follow JEMHCloud will probably start with a Cloud pricing model the same as Agile.

Beta timing; yes, end of this meek is planned for start of beta, some last minute performance changes are going into minimise downtime later.

Seeing it; well, you can drop support@thepluginpeople.coma line you'll be handled via JEMHCloud hooked up to our JIRACloud instance. What you can see from that would be the customization of layout, css and images.

Features currently not yet there are Directives, we hope to have that done by end of beta (planning August for that, with live in September, just ready for Summit!)

Service Desk Recap

Just to touch on ServiceDesk though, there are plans afoot for support of email only users within ServiceDesk. Innevitable for sure. Meantime JEMHCloud will be targetting the value-add angle and of course, for those not wanting to use ServiceDesk for whatever reason.

James Flavell July 28, 2014

Thanks Andy

The standard ServiceDesk I am probably not going to take up or if I do it will still be with something like JEMH as the main issue I face is the standard email handlers are far from what I need.

Will look to take a look at JEMHCloud by mid August as travelling right now

Many thanks
James

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Timothy
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May 7, 2014

is JIRA Service Desk generally meant for such a scenario?

Until Atlassian changes the licensing model, no. At the moment, Service Desk is meant for "internal support" as every user needs to have an account in JIRA.

Unless money is no constraint to you..

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