An update on Jira Service Management customer feedback – February 2023

[#1]

Hello Community,

We’re always looking at how to improve Jira Service Management and customer feedback plays an important role in making sure we're investing in the areas that will bring you the most value. My name is Jonathan Harrison and I’m stepping in this quarter for @shihab to share the latest updates on the areas we’re improving based on some of the key themes we hear in customer feedback.

Usability and efficiency

”Night mode, for the love of your customers' eyes. Staring at a white background is not good for you. I have to use a chrome extension, and it isn't ideal.”

We’re committed to helping you work and collaborate efficiently using Jira Service Management. For some of our customers, this means offering the ability to modify the appearance of the UI and for others it’s templates to get you up and running as soon as possible.

We’re excited to deliver an early access preview of one of our most requested features, a dark theme (and a new light theme as well) to Jira Cloud products, including Jira Service Management. We’re providing early access to themes in Jira labs, which means you get to test it out early and help us make the feature the best it can be. Once you’ve opted into the experience, you’ll be able to switch between our new light and dark themes. Learn more about how to help us test Jira’s new dark theme.

In a help desk, we understand there are certain responses that are used repeatedly by different agents while having to reply to similar tickets for repetitive problems. Currently, there's no way to save commonly used responses in Jira Service Management Cloud to be used while sending a reply to a help seeker. Each time the agent has to type out the response or store it in a shared document and paste the response from there. We're evaluating potential solutions to canned responses and will share more in the coming months.

We’ve also recently rolled out two new project templates for design and sales teams. The design service management template provides teams with a central place to easily track and manage design requests, from new asset creation to revisions. The sales service management template provides teams with a central place to manage, track, and report on sales requests from quote support to contract reviews. These new templates are for company-managed projects and will then be rolled out for team-managed projects next month. Learn more about creating a project using a service project template.

It’s now quicker and easier to replace the workflow (or issue type) of a request type. Simply select the workflow/issue type that you need and within seconds it's done. Currently, you can only select workflows within your service desk project, but we’re working towards enabling workflows across your entire instance, so you can remap a request type to any workflow without navigating out of your project.

Modifying request types and custom fields also just got easier. We just released the new field panel that gives you access to all the fields on your instance on the right-hand panel of your request type configuration. This means you no longer need to modify screens to add fields to request types. When you add a custom field to a request type, we’ll add it to the underlying screens as needed. When a field is added to either the request form or the issue view, we will update screens behind the scenes so you can focus on configuring your request type catalog.

Tracking, reporting and representing work

”I would like see the data in Jira in some reporting tool. To visualize how many tickets in queue, resolved and which are on high priority. To set priority and it also helps in managing work a lot.”

ITSM metrics and reporting remain a top ask from many customers. As covered in our last update, Atlassian Data Lake and Atlassian Analytics are now available in Open Beta for Jira Service Management Cloud Enterprise customers and offer simple and flexible ways to visualize data across Atlassian products and other data sources. These tools not only allow you to track key metrics across change, incident, and request management, but also enable you to monitor and alleviate service blockers that are impacting time-to-value for your customers. Atlassian Analytics and Atlassian Data Lake will be generally available for Cloud Enterprise customers in the coming months. Learn more about setting up Atlassian Analytics as a Cloud Enterprise customer.

The new Approvals Activity tab makes it easier to clearly see who approved or declined what (and when) and the status of an approval as it progresses. The new experience is faster to load and more importantly, offers greater transparency and tracking of the approval process. We’ve also integrated those events into the All Activity tab, so you can easily see what else was happening on the request while the approval was open, as well as what happened to it after the approval was completed. Learn more about approvals in Jira Service Management Cloud.

Set up, configuration and administration

”Some of the configurations can be relatively convoluted to find. There are also some granular controls do not exist, that in my opinion should. Otherwise it is a well made product that is a pleasure to work with.”

Many customers tell us they rely on their internal user provisioning process in order to ensure the correct users get access to their Atlassian products, in the right way.

We’re committed to helping customers to streamline their user provisioning process. So we’ve developed a way for org admins to turn off all user-to-user invitations and access requests in the admin.atlassian.com 'User access settings' area.

We’ll be rolling this out to all customers in the coming months. Follow the Allow admins to disable user invitations ticket to find out more including how you can opt into the beta.

Integrations and extensibility

“Is there a way to integrate Microsoft Teams and set up a channel where customers can raise a request? I want to integrate Teams so customers can go to a specific Teams channel and they can raise a request through Teams.”

We’re happy to report the Microsoft Teams integration (launched as an early access feature back in June) is available for all Jira Service Management Cloud customers now. This integration makes it easier for your incident responders to communicate, collaborate, and resolve incidents. Incident responders can now:

• Create chats and meetings to collaborate during incidents

• Invite other responders to join your chat or meeting

• View all incident details in the chat or meeting

• Update the incident priority and assign the incident to yourself from the chat

• Add chat messages from Teams as internal notes to the incident or as a reply to the customer.

Connect your Microsoft tenant to your Jira site, and enable it on the projects where you’d like to use the integration. Then, when an incident occurs, you can create a Teams meeting (or a chat) to unite your team and begin working on the incident together.

Learn more about how to connect Microsoft Teams to your service project and create a chat channel from an incident.

Using the Editor

”Atlassian has damaged its formerly excellent reputation with its insistence on keeping smartlinks the default behavior. Fix it. Nobody will take you seriously otherwise.”

The option to disable smart links for non-Atlassian products has been released. Thank you all for your valuable feedback and special thanks to those who participated in user testing sessions with us. This means all Jira Service Management users can now either:

• keep smart links as your default view, but add exceptions for the domains you want to insert as simple URLs instead (eg. your dev/stage environments or third-party tools you use that you’d rather see the URL for), or

• turn smart links off by default, but add exceptions for the domains you want to keep them for (eg. Jira, Confluence, Google Drive or Figma).

You can Manage your link preferences or access the settings page by clicking your avatar at the top right of your product, clicking ‘Manage account’ and then heading to the ‘Link preferences’ tab. Follow our step-by-step guide for more information.

While we're confident this solution will satisfy the needs of most users, we acknowledge that there's a need for a site-wide, admin-controlled setting as well. Follow our progress via Site admins can change the smart link default view for all users.

Technical performance

”It's sometimes a bit slow - mostly to update the pages or open a ticket.”

We understand how important it is to ensure a fast experience, at scale, for all teams using Jira Service Management and we’re taking steps to address areas that can lead to certain experiences feeling unresponsive or slow.

One recent performance improvement we’re happy to announce is for Jira Service Management queues. Not only have we made them more performant, but we’ve increased the number of queues per work category from 50 to 300. We’re also preparing 10K Agent Scale for General Availablility launch in Q1 2023, with a 20K Agent Scale Early Access Program to follow shortly after.

So, thank you again for continuing to share your feedback with us. Watch this article to be sent a notification when there’s another update next quarter or stay across what we have planned for Jira Service Management on our Cloud Roadmap.

[Diogo Rodrigues]

Hello thanks for the udpates.

Regarding integration with teams I would recommend you to have a look on the app Microsoft 365.

I do not work there. I've no benefits with this, I'm just a user with a very good experience with it.

Regarding canned answers I would recommend to have a look at app "Response templates for Jira. Pro" at least for me has all the necessary features on this topic. Allows to have global an personal templates. Better than that only if there was "Team templates".

[Erki Tammik]

Hello,

Approvals

Please add a status tag or checkmark after the approver's name to indicate the approval status. This will allow us to see all the necessary information at once when we open up the ticket. Right now, we have to open a separate tab to see information. This information could be made available without requiring an extra step.

Using a tab is a good way to display more detailed information, including the date and time.

Something like this would be good: https://ibb.co/0c38YKD
There is no reason to hide this information from main ticket view.

A green checkmark was added after approver name on the Data Center when the request was approved. You can see an image of it here. Please check the approver's name, which is Frank Smith.

[Emma Hamlin]

I'm looking forward to hearing more about you solution for canned responses.  We used Knowledge Bases and copy / paste now, but a canned response is something I have been missing since using Jira Service Management.

Many thanks

Emma

[Todd Thomas]

“You can't improve what you don't measure.”

Reporting and analytics are fundamental to good service management. It's frustrating to see Atlassian tying reporting and analytics to only the Enterprise version of JSM. While enterprises have more data to mine, JSM's current lack of reporting and analytics is inhibiting one of the biggest benefits of an ITSM system- determining the demand for services from customers and how agents interact with that demand to create value (ITIL v4). Every organization (large or small) could benefit from knowing how they fulfill services.

Please, Atlassian, push reporting and analytics out from only Enterprises to all tiers of JSM. We shouldn't have to rely on a third party app to get data that should be available natively.

On a different note, it's encouraging to see the Cloud version finally addressing the lack of canned responses. We hope this feature will be implemented soon, as it's one of the major foundational features missing in Cloud today.

[stefaan.verkest@bekaertdeslee.com]

@Emma Hamlin 

I totally agree with you, the absence of canned responses is an absolute miss. We thought about using email-this-issue to solve it, using templates there, but this is a lot work to set this up properly.

[Bill Goetz]

I agree with what @Todd Thomas mentioned, it is disappointing that the only route is upgrading to Enterprise tier to get better reporting features. Although I understand Atlassian's need to upsell, it's difficult to convince my leaders to upgrade again, when they've just gotten used to the significantly higher costs of the JSM cloud. SOME of the Atlassian Analytics reporting features should be in JSM out of the box, just to see what it can possibly do. It would be even better if I could try the full Analytics feature set for 90 days, so I could evaluate the features, and determine if it's even worth the cost for the enterprise tier. 

[Michele Bazzani]

I can not find any information about Enterprise that doesn't require a sales pitch, which is disappointing. 

I am also disappointed there was no announcement regarding the CSAT survey.  You have had a ticket open since 2016 about being able to ask more than a single question and making this more user-friendly without having to rely on work around and add-ons.  This is a fundamental feature, and for something like this not to have it is VERY disappointing.

[Michele Bazzani]

@Emma Hamlin if this helps, we use ITSM for an external portal's tech support, and many of those responses are canned.  We use the O365 integration and templates with canned responses that we can select and send.  That is for external users.

For internal, you could create a field with different canned options and then, upon selection, have automation send a response.

Just a thought :) 

[Rishabh Bansal]

Hi @Todd Thomas @Bill Goetz, thanks for sharing your feedback on Reporting & Analytics functionality for JSM.

I'm a Product Manager working on Reporting & Analytics for JSM & Opsgenie. 

I would love to interact with you and understand your requirements & use cases for Reporting & Analytics within JSM. 

I hope you'll provide your valuable time and share your feedback to help us prioritise our efforts and deliver better value.

Please use this Calendly link to book a slot. It'll be on a zoom call for around 45-60 mins. Incase you are not able to find a slot, please reach out to me at rbansal@atlassian.com 

I'm looking forward to meeting you and get your valuable insights. 

Cheers

[Salvatore Insalaco]

In the approvals screenshot you can see clearly that on the right side there're approval groups with the names of users belonging to group under them (e.g. "Security and Payroll").

When I do the same (approval groups) I see only the name of the groups, without the names.

Is this an unreleased feature?

[menit lop]

Thank you, Jonathan, for keeping us updated on the improvements being made to Jira Service Management. It's great to hear that customer feedback is being taken into account to make the platform even better. Looking forward to seeing the updates in action!

[Michael -Get Report-]

+1 for canned responses. It's should be so convenient!