Atlassian adds Halp to the biggest Slack channel for internal support

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Atlassians are among those millions of chat platform enthusiasts. We use Slack to facilitate real-time conversations within and across teams, to share news, and – as chat has become an integral part of teams’ day-to-day workflows – to provide IT support to employees. Our Workplace Productivity team started a Slack support channel, and these days, it has the highest membership rate of any non-mandatory channel in the Atlassian Slack – more than 60 percent. 

Of course, offering support in Slack presented some challenges. Despite fielding about 850 requests per month in the chat platform, the team didn’t have a simple way to track open requests, volume, or employee satisfaction, and workarounds could be time-consuming. The team had access to all these metrics for their Jira Service Management tickets, but Slack support wasn’t as easy to track.

The challenges of Slack support

The team was already committed to meeting our employees where they were (Slack), and we knew the need for chat support was only going to grow. But as we tried to implement a support system without Halp, we ran into some key challenges. 

The primary challenge is what we refer to as “the black hole of chat.” In a fast-moving conversational platform, it was easy for requests to get overlooked for a variety of reasons. 

We also struggled with volume tracking – we needed to know how many requests we were getting and our ticket resolution rate. Jira Service Management tracks these things well, but before Halp, the only way to monitor this in Slack would have been to manually count or input each chat request into Jira Service Management as a ticket. Both options required a lot of manual work for support agents and threatened to slow ticket resolution.

Our third key challenge was measuring employee satisfaction with conversational support. We needed to know how we were doing, but there was no simple way to track our success via Slack. Our temporary solution was to send email surveys after a support request was closed, but this yet again required manual work from support agents.

With these hurdles top of mind, we turned to Halp and set out to reach three key goals:

1. Make it quick and easy for teams to create and track tickets in the chat.

2. Make sure we saw and addressed every request in Slack.

3. Measure customer satisfaction and ticket volume.

See the full blog for more details on their goals.

Rolling out Halp to meet our Slack support goals

With those goals in mind, the Workplace Productivity team implemented Halp in our biggest support channel and synced it with our existing Jira Service Management ticketing system.

1. Quick and easy ticket tracking

2. Addressing every request

3. Measuring volume and satisfaction

The results

Just two months after launching Halp, chat support requests were up by 17 percent, and Jira tickets dropped by 23 percent. This means that 71 percent of all support requests (800 – 1,000 per month) now come through Halp, verifying what we suspected: employees prefer conversational support. 

Our service ratings are also doing well, with an average of 4.91 stars out of 5 given on approximately 120 surveys completed per month. 

Survey the team and you’ll also hear about how much we love that we can: 

• Combine multiple Slack messages into a single thread and ticket

• Add images in Slack and automatically sync them as attachments in Jira

• Scan our triage channel in Slack for what’s open vs. closed

• Send our agents instant notifications in Slack, even if a ticket was created in Jira

• Let end users see their open tickets in App Home without leaving Slack

Read the full blog and see what Atlassian is planning to do next.