📣 Early access program - canned responses in Jira Service Management

[#1]

We’re excited to announce our early access program for canned responses in Jira Service Management. This new feature will allow project admins and agents to create predefined responses that are frequently used, and quickly insert them in issue replies.

How will this help my teams?

• Increased agent productivity due to easy availability of frequently used responses, right from the comments editor.

• Standardized response from the teams. The project admins can create these responses as a source of truth, that the agents can then share with the help seekers.

How does it work?

• Project admins can create shared (with the project agents) canned responses. These help teams standardize the replies and consider a reply as the source of truth. These shared canned responses will be accessible to all agents of the project.

• Agents and project admins can create personal canned responses that they can use in future comments. These can be signatures or unique greetings specific to the agent.

• All canned responses can be accessed from the comments editor in the issue view.

• Variables can be inserted into the canned responses while they are created. When the canned responses with smart values are inserted in the comments these smart values automatically convert to actual values.

• This is the beginning of many canned response enhancements coming out incrementally over the next few months.

What’s involved in the early access program (EAP)?

As part of the EAP, you’ll have early access to this feature, so you can try it out and also have an opportunity to provide feedback that will help shape the future of the Canned Response feature.

How do I sign up for the early access program?

You can sign up through this link. You will need to be a Jira Admin or a Project Admin to signup for this EAP. We also want to note that this is a limited EAP, which means we cannot guarantee a spot for all customers who express interest. Those who are selected will be informed via email and we will enable this feature within a week. The rest of the customers who expressed interest will get this feature within 2-3 weeks.

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Great feature @Joseph !

Thank you for sharing and I have already expressed my interest in participating in this EAP!

[Masayuki Abe]

Nice feature. Makes replying to our clients a breeze.

[Curt Holley]

This is bound to be popular!!!

Question @Joseph 
Is this a takeover and incorporation of this existing app? Canned Responses Pro Templates for Jira | Atlassian Marketplace
or Atlassian's from scratch version of that kind of functionality??

[Joseph]

Hi @Curt Holley 

Our team built this canned response feature in-house based on customer feedback and it is available out of the box in Jira Service Management. 

Cheers

[Hana Kučerová]

Nice! I'm looking forward to it!

[Kalin U]

@Joseph I'm excited to see "Canned responses" rolling out to early adopters 🎉 It looks super easy to use albeit I miss some best practice examples to get the most value out of it.

Two questions:

1. How do you prefer that we EAP participants submit feedback on it? Through the EAP service portal, by email (I couldn't find yours)?
2. Any chance that we can use Automation's smart values as variables in the templates? The selection for inserting variables is quite limited (only 5), whereas Automation's smart values provide tens if not hundreds of fields. Point in case - I'd like to insert the ticket's URL so email receivers hop straight to the ticket for further actions on it through customer-visible transitions once they get in the portal.

K.

[Joseph]

@Kalin U 

Thanks for the questions. There are three ways to share feedback
1. You can reply to the EAP notification email (that you received when you got access to EAP)

2. You can email me at jjayanth@atlassian.com

3. You can schedule a call with me here. 

Variables are something we are definitely going to add over time, but I would love to know which variables are most important to your use case now. 

thanks

joe

[Kalin U]

Hi, @Joseph 

All emails that came on your behalf, including the "EAP notification email" and "Early access to canned responses: Tell us about your experience" come from no-reply@automation.atlassian.com. Hitting the "Reply" button doesn't change to your email address, hence my question in the community. You may want to modify your automation rule so that the reply-to address is yours and not the default one.

Regarding variables, here are a few that will definitely support our case:

• request URL in the portal - it helps us prompt the (email client) user to open the ticket in the service portal instead and transition it (close it, for instance)
• portal URL - it helps us direct our (email client) users to explore additional options for support requests
• SLA (date and time before breach) - it helps us inform our (email client) users know how long it would take agents to fulfil their requests / how long the customer has before automatically closing the ticket.

These are already in Jira and available via "smart value" notations such as {{issue.url.customer}}. I can also think of our own custom variables, such as links to FAQs article in our knowledge base, to a specific request type, to a different service portal. These are very handy, but not as important as the Jira variables.

K.

[Joseph]

Thanks @Kalin U 

Sorry about the "no-reply@automation.atlassian.com". I will edit that. 

cheers

joe

[Greg Lochner]

Good Morning Joe,

Will we be able to control visibility of these canned responses? One of the nice things about the Canned Responses Pro Templates for Jira | Atlassian Marketplace plugin is that you can set the viewability at the group level and not only at the project level.

Our organization has many groups, and having every group see each others canned responses would cause a lot of confusion.

Thanks!

[Anne Mari Nedevska]

Hi @Joseph 

I second Greg's suggestion - we would very much like group and global level canned responses. 

I would also like: 

• the ability to make personal templates into shared templates 
• availability on transition screens
• edit mode with expandable window

Thanx!

Anne Mari

[Joseph]

Hi @Anne Mari Nedevska and @Greg Lochner 

Currently, group and global level is not something we plan to build in the next 6 months. 

Cheers

Joe

[Yatish Madhav]

Hi - thanks for this post. 

I second the points raised by @Anne Mari Nedevska - I have also raised an issue on the EAP service desk.

Please advise on how I can keep track of the Canned Response feature and when it would be pushed to GA. Also, is this only available to me since I request the EAP access or is it visible to everyone on the instance?

Thank you

[Joseph]

@Yatish Madhav 

Hi, the canned response feature will be shipped to all Jira Service Management customers before the end of next week. 

EAP was enabled for the entire site, so all agents on that site would be able to use Canned Response in Jira Service Management. 

Cheers

Joe

[Yatish Madhav]

OK super! Thanks @Joseph - looking forward to it being used more widely.

Please advise how I can keep track on any improvments and updates specifically around the Canned Response feature? Thank you

[Carlos Espino]

Long awaited addition to JSM, thank you! Would love to see the ability to embed images in the canned responses and more variables. 

[Sue Lund]

This could be a very useful feature, but I agree with those who asked for the ability to share with a group, rather than everyone.
Also, one request is to be able to add a date variable for when you are requesting a customer response by a certain day or date.
E.g. "Please respond by Friday...", or "Please respond by [one week from today]..."

[Sven Spaniel]

Where can I find the function to create shared responses?

[Joseph]

Hi @Sven Spaniel 

Only project administrators can create shared canned responses. 

Cheers

Joe

[Sven Spaniel]

Hi @Joseph

Thanks for the quick reply. Our problem was the missing "projectadmin" role. We had admin access as sideadmin but not as projectadmin. Then the toggle button was not displayed.

[christopherl]

Hi @Joseph

This functionality will be amazing for our team! We've heard some feedback regarding the order in which the canned responses show,  would it be possible to flip the order of canned responses (or allow users to flip the order) so Personal responses are shown first? 

Thanks!

--Liz

[Anis Sitia]

Hi @Joseph ,

Loving the new feature!

However, it'd be super great to have the canned responses to be shareable globally/across multiple projects.

I've raised a ticket with Atlassian with the said improvement suggestion here: JST-874959 

Thanks!
Anis

[Kristin Graffee]

Hi @Joseph

For my team being able to allow users to create shared canned responses even if they are not project admins would be appreciated. 

[Helen J]

Hi @Joseph 

I raised an EAP support a couple of weeks ago on this feature but this has vanished: CRIJ-325

Jira canned responses seemed very limited atm as far as I can tell:

• No management option in settings
• No global option - have to add to each project
• No signature feature

[Joseph]

Hello everyone

Thank you for taking the time to send your feedback. This is very helpful. We will work on the feedback in the future based on the demand for these features.

Thanks

Joe