How to set up a Jira Service Management that your agents love

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Do you know how your employees feel about their tools?

What do IT professionals expect from their workplace? How can you make them feel excited every day about their job? What can you do to increase their sense of accomplishment and diminish their frustration so they don’t look for career opportunities elsewhere?

Having the perfect applications for the job is an important benefit, particularly for anybody working in IT. Nobody wants to work with legacy software, outdated UIs and cumbersome change management.

In fact, 77% of organizations say good employees will look for a new employer if their current job does not provide the tools, technology, or information they need to do their job well.

In this article I’m going to dive a bit deeper into what IT Service Management professionals actually expect of their work tools, and what are the big drivers for setting up a Jira Service Management that makes them love their job.

Expectations of IT Service Management professionals in 2021

IT and Telecommunications are the 4th industry with the highest potential for remote work. In a landscape of home offices, organizations can control little but the stack that they offer their employees.

To be attractive, that stack needs to be aligned with higher expectations than ever. With Millennials already making up about a 50% of the workforce, what employees want from 8 to 5 resembles very closely their everyday digital experiences as consumers.

As a quick reference, let’s consider these three aspect:

• Easy to use. The application requires no previous expertise and becomes intuitive after a quick walkthrough.
• Quick time to value. Professional goals can be achieved in a predictable manner with few steps.
• Second to none. There should not be any alternatives that can be perceived as being superior or solving better any niche problems – the risk is losing employee engagement against shadow IT initiatives.

Anything that blocks users from this golden standard can be perceived as friction and create a desire of change. Manual and repetitive tasks are beyond inefficiency – they’re really hard to swallow.

And how frustrating is it to be able to use some applications on a mobile phone, but not others? Tasks that could be solved or handed over on the go get on the way – and on our nerves.

Designing a stellar employee experience with Jira Service Management, however, doesn’t have to be mission: impossible. Here are three areas that you can consider starting now.

Go Omnichannel

Omnichannel is not just for customers. It's also vital for supporting the preferences of employees in their daily routines.

In the crazy nineties, IT folks received requests per phone and email only. A centralized ticketing system was a great step towards solving chronic service management fatigue (as wonderfully explained in the starting moves of The Phoenix Project).

Nowadays, many employees believe in the omnichannel promise as the best strategy to engage effectively with their customers. The channel doesn’t matter: what matters is that problems are solved and can be picked up again from any point.

Example of an omnichannel Service Desk experience

Stephanie is a graphic designer who is experiencing crashes in the company’s file management system. She jumps on a chat widget on the Customer Portal to explain her problem. Marvin, his colleague in the support team, chats back to ask for further instructions. Every bit of information is stored in Jira Service Management, so the ticket can be shared with the Amanda, the Infrastucture Lead. When the problem is solved, Steffi receives a notification in her email and Slack.

Support Globally, Speak Locally

Internal and external customers can be based anywhere. And they may write good English. Or not at all.

How are you going to ensure that you can help customers from anywhere in the world with your current team? The answer used to be: hiring professionals that speak lots of languages. But that doesn’t scale.

Right now, this is the answer: powering up agents with AI translation engines like Google Translate.

Combined with the channels, you can start looking, for example, at chats with real time translations. In a short time, that will be possible with phone and video calls as well.

Keep reading: Translation Bots are the Future of Service Desks

Example of an omnilanguage Service Desk experience

Haruto is buying a pair of headphones from an ecommerce, but needs to know whether they are compatible with her current device. She opens the chat and asks a question in Japanese. Francoise, who’s handling the incoming questions, gets Haruto’s question directly translated into French and starts a conversation with her. Each of them writes in her own language, but they’re still having a real time conversation. Is this conversation happening in French or in Japanese? It’s both, and it’s neither. As in the case above, the chat thread is stored in JSM and can be managed as a normal ticket.

Automate Everything

Having a robot as a personal assistant can make a significant change in the everyday life of a Jira Service Management agent. Particularly, if you realize that most of the gains of automation usage are related to productivity and manual tasks, as supported by some insights in Adaptavist's State of the Atlassian Ecosystem Report.

There are dozens of work streams where automations can gradually replace repetitive manual chores. Some of the quicker wins can be found in these areas:

• Automated ticket routing. Make sure that every ticket is in safe hands by creating rules that assign them to relevant agents depending in their background.
• Canned responses. Many interactions with customers can be typified into templates and automated or semi-automated. For example, first responses to a ticket, notifications of a ticket being closed, requests for an NPS score, etc.
• Automated transitions. What should be the status of a ticket after each touchpoint? Automating the ticket workflow reduces the amount of actions (and the cognitive overload) that an agent needs for each ticket.

Automations need to start simple before they prove their value. That being said, nothing should stop you from combining different automations in a flow where the amount of user input is minimized to what a robot can’t do: understanding customers and helping them out.

Example of an automated Service Desk experience

Haruto is buying an extra subwaffer for her home cinema, and again she’s worried about compatibility with her existing equipment. When she writes in the chat, her request is automatically identified as a Japanese question and assigned to Miruki, who has just been hired to do support for Japanese customers. But even before Miruki gets to the chat, Haruto has already received a canned response translated to Japanese letting her know that her question has been assigned to an expert who is online and will be in touch in a matter of minutes.

How to set up an omnilingual, omnichannel & automated JSM

Each of these three challenges have their own complexities and may be hard to tackle at the same time.

Luckily for you, resolution and Appfire are partnering to showcase a simple recipe that addresses all of them. If you’re interested in providing customers and experts with the best Jira Service Management experience, make sure to join us on Feb 10th!

In this webinar, Vasiliy and I will walk you through a step-by-step process of setting up Jira Service Management so your agents can have fun solving customer problems. Hope to see you there!