🎉 What's new in Jira Service Management for Customer Service? - August 2023

[#1]

Earlier this year we released Rich Customer Context, the first of our new customer service management features for Jira Service Management. Customers and organizations now have their own profile pages, complete with detail fields that provide context for agents, and can be used with JQL to configure SLAs, queues, reports and more. If you haven’t seen these new features, check them out here!

We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to these new capabilities. We're gratified that you share our excitement. Today, I want to share some new features we’ve shipped recently based on your feedback, and give you some insight into what you can expect to see next.

New features available today

Import customer and organization details from anywhere through CSVs

We know your customer data often lives in other tools, particularly CRMs. In fact, bringing that data into Jira Service Management has been the #1 request we’ve heard. You can now quickly and easily import customer and organization details from anywhere, through CSV files, so you can use this information to provide better customer service without switching tools!

To get started, simply navigate to the Customer or Organization list pages in the left side project navigation, and select ‘Import details’ at the top right. You’ll need to use the CSV formats described here. If you need to bulk create new customers, you can read documentation for that here.

A note on some limitations and workarounds:

Note that if customers or organizations from other projects are in your CSV file, these organizations and their customers will be added to the project you’re importing to, and their details will be updated everywhere on your site. You have two workarounds here:

1. Make sure only customers or organizations that are already in the project you’re importing into are in your CSV file.

2. Create a new temporary project, turn off customer notifications for invitations, and import all your customers and organizations into this project. This will update customer and organization details everywhere.

We prioritised making this feature available to you ASAP, and will continue to build on it to give you more options, including over the above behaviour.

CSVs are only the beginning on import and syncing options. Keep an eye out for APIs and more.

Make profiles your own by reordering details

You can now reorder your detail fields on customer and organization profiles, so you can organise information however works best for you. Simply navigate to a customer or organization profile page, select ‘Manage details’ from the top right meatball menu, and drag into the right order.

What’s coming next?

Note: these form a current view of our plans, but are subject to change at any time.

New detail field types

Later in August, you’ll be able to create customer and organization detail fields with a whole range of different types. This gives you finer control of detail values. You’ll be able to use them in JQL, too.

We're bringing the following field types to customer and organization details: text, numbers, selects, multiselects, emails, phone numbers, dates, URLs.

Bringing customer context to the issue view

We’ll be bringing customer details to the issue view later in the year, so agents have all the context they need to resolve a request without leaving the issue.

You’ll be able to control which details you would like to see on the issue view, and which customer and/or organization shows on each request. 

Helping customer service teams collaborate with Dev and Ops through better escalations

We believe bringing development, operations and customer service teams together to collaborate on a single platform is incredibly powerful. The Atlassian platform enables this.

We also know collaborating on requests between customer service and development or operations teams, working in different places, can be painful. We’re leveraging the power of the Atlassian platform to create elegant new ways for these teams to collaborate effectively and enable great customer outcomes.

Do you have thoughts or feedback?

If any of these features will be particularly useful for you, I would love to hear how you’re planning to use them, and what you need from them.

If you have any feedback about using Jira Service Management for customer service today, or have other capabilities that you would love to see as part of our customer service offering, I’d love to hear that, too. Your feedback directly informs our roadmap.

You can share your thoughts and feedback directly with me at graubenheimer@atlassian.com, or book some time for us to talk. You can also leave feedback in product, including in the customer and organization profile pages. We can’t wait to hear from you.

[David Berclaz]

Hi @Gabriel Raubenheimer

Thanks for the news!

How do you manage to define fields other than Text, in your reordering screencast?
On our instance, the Type is greyed out when creating a new organization detail field:

Thanks for your help,

David

[Paul Madison]

Will this allow me to bulk add Customers to an Organization?

[Kris Dewachter]

This would be a great feature. Would it also be possible to link the customers to a usergroup while importing ?

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

@David Berclaz new detail field types are yet to be released. You can expect to have them available mid-late August. Cheers!

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

@Paul Madison you can't add customers to organizations with this import at the moment.

However, we have another easy way to do this:

1. Go to Projects > Project Name > Customers > Add Customers (button in top right corner).

2. Add the emails of any customers you want added to the organization. You can use commas or semi-colons as separators between emails. If you have a .CSV file, you can paste the data into the invite window.

3. Select the organization you would like to add these customers to.

4. Select Enter. This invite will email the customers, asking them to complete their account set up to access your project.

Hope this helps.

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

@Kris Dewachter you can't currently associate customers with groups or organizations during import. You can find out more about adding customers to organizations here, and managing groups here.

[Paul Madison]

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to bulk add existing customers to an Organization.

Hopefully this feature will be fleshed out in the future.

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

Hi @Paul Madison ,

If you enter the email addresses of existing customers, via the method described above, it will add those existing customers to the organization you select.

Does this solve your problem?

Cheers

[Paul Madison]

@Gabriel Raubenheimer,

I was able to add Customers to Orgs by copying and pasting the emails.  Thanks

We would like to be able to add customers to and Organizations via groups.  Is that something being worked on?

[Sina Schwarz]

So on the last community post about this topic I asked how this new feature would integrate into assets. Any answer to that part?

[RM]

Hi @Gabriel Raubenheimer ,

I tried to import the customer details. I'm getting the error. Further i have attached format of csv please let me know if the format needs to be changed. 

[Lilian Wang]

Hi @Rahul M 

The CSV looks like it's formatted correctly. Please reach out to suppport so we can help you diagnose the issue.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

@Rahul M hey there, quick update on this one (and for anyone else looking). Thank you for reporting this.

We've found an issue which has stopped some uploads from working. We're working on a fix now and will have one out ASAP. I'll post back when it's resolved.

Cheers

Gabriel

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

Hi everyone, a quick couple of updates:

1. We've resolved an issue that prevented some people from uploading CSVs. This has now been fixed and it should work for you.
2. New detail fields are now available!

We hope these are useful for you! Please let me know if you have any feedback.

cc  @Rahul M 

[Majken Longlade]

Will we be able to sync data from eg HubSpot to these fields? 

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

@Majken Longlade syncing from CRMs is part of our future roadmap. APIs will also be available, and much sooner, as an alternative solution for you.

[Leonardo Boldrini]

Hi, @Gabriel Raubenheimer is there a release date for Standard plan about these precious features (customer and organization context)? Thanks

Leonardo 

[Greg D]

Hi @Gabriel Raubenheimer, I just sent you an email with this, but I thought it might be good to add here too.

One thing that would be really helpful with the new feature is hiding the "Organizations" section on the left panel for users that do not have permissions to manage organizations.  If this site setting is toggled this way (in today's world):

If you do not have Rich Customer Context turned on for a project, at least the non-admin users would not have an organizations button at the top right of the Customers section, but with this new setting, it is highlighting Organizations as a "new" feature and then either having nothing in it with no actions available (if no Orgs exist) or trash icons that are not functional after attempting to remove the Org (this happens with and without Rich Context on).  Would be good to improve this and only let users see the Org section on the left if there is at least one Org in the project (do not show that section at all if you cannot manage the Orgs and none exist).

Additionally, it would be good to have more project role control on who can actually create/manage Orgs (besides just Admins or everyone).  Have a setting within the project itself that lets us choose whether to allow managing Orgs for that project (and set roles that can do it)... then if you cannot, that section is hidden for that project.  That better aligns with the global setting hiding it everywhere, yet allowing for more granular setups per project if it is on for a user.

Here are some screenshots that hopefully help explain the pieces I am referring to.  Would be good to clean this up and make it less distracting for general agents.

Get rid of this if there are no Orgs and you cannot create one (could even make it a project setting to let us hide that all together even if you can edit them... make it so it is only visible on the Jira issue itself and let admins handle any edits needed):

With that section visible for non-editors, it just brings them to a non-functional page:

Without Rich Customer Context on, it looks like this and within this section you have no mention of Organizations if none exist and you cannot create them (a good thing):

If an Org does exist, unfortunately there is always a trash can icon even if it is not functional (this is regardless of if you have the Rich Context on):

It just gives this general error after a couple of clicks if you try to delete one and you cannot:

Love the Rich Customer Context and it helps prevent users from creating unnecessary Organizations too (when we have it on for a site, agents constantly create organizations when they mean to create a customer and we have a bunch of random email addresses as Orgs that need to be cleaned up).  Looking to improve that user behavior by having more control as an admin, having the defaults be less intriguing to users that do not need these settings, and having more granular permissions for who can manage Orgs.

Every section within Jira and on Jira issues should only show if you have permission to manage it.  This should be improved for Organizations, Automation Rules, Apps, etc. It would be really helpful to not add cognitive load to the general users and let them focus on working the requests.  Thanks!

[Greg D]

Hello again.  So looks like there is a new "Customer" grouping starting to flow into the issue detail view.  This is really confusing as it will only describe the Reporter (Request Participants are customers too, yet they are not in that grouping).

This section is hogging real estate, and it is duplicating fields since we store some customer details on issues too (since we never had an alternative).  Would be grateful if you can pivot this as soon as possible and make that info a part of the "View Profile" on hover instead (replace the Looks like we’re off the beaten track page that shows for portal-only customers with this new glance as that will only be value added instead of what this is now).

Or maybe automatically group Reporter and Request Participants into this new section and make it so those fields are not duplicated and that they are editable within this Customers glance and we can move this new section anywhere on the issue screen.  This section is not helpful right now.  And please also hide Organizations from the left panel.  Thanks.

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

@Greg D  Thanks for the fantastic feedback. This is very insightful.

We're looking into the issue you're having removing orgs, and have taken on your feedback about the Organizations tab being unnecessary when you're not using organizations.

We hear you on Customer Context on the issue view not suiting your use case at the moment. We've launched this first version in response to many people wanting context on the issue view specifically about their Reporters and Organizations.

We plan to evolve this to give you more control over what you see there, and to bring all customer related fields together and allow them to be edited, as you suggested, in one place.

We're not there yet, although we're actively working towards it. In the meantime, the Customer panel can be turned off in Request Type config.

Question on this: "it is duplicating fields since we store some customer details on issues too (since we never had an alternative)"

Will you not now be able to use Customers and Organizations to store this info?

[Greg D]

I responded in our email convo, but I probably should have highlighted it here for everyone.  Unfortunately, right now it will not make sense to store this in the customer/organization section because the values are not always equal to each other in our use-cases and so it will be confusing for the agents (a Reporter could be primary on a certain account, but the request is related to a different account if that makes sense).  At some point we may be able to pivot to it once request participants are in that section and we can do some cleanup, but certain fields are also needed for integrations.

I can see how this will be helpful once we can bucket more fields in that section and edit them there... if we could have Reporter, Request participants, and Organizations only live in that one "Customers" section and be editable right there instead of needing the additional fields it will be helpful.  Might be cool to migrate the X raised this request via Email/Portal/Jira info that is currently in the request detail section to only live in your new Customers section too (maybe it just says via Portal next to the reporter there instead of talking about "raising the request" which is superfluous... simplify the screen by reducing duplicate info, removing cognitive load, and getting everyone to focus in your next section for customer details... can still keep "View request in portal" link in the request form section or just above all tabs so it is omnipresent since that is more likely where you would launch that instead of from your new customers info section).

Oh, I also wanted to mention that it is good that you can hide this whole section at the request type level when you have it on, because there are times where the Reporter also does not equal the "Customer" either.

[Dmitry Astapkovich _Colined_]

A bit (a lot in fact) offtopic, but: will it be ever possible to have multiple widgets/gadgets in a single project? 
That may sound but this is one of the biggest limitations we have with Serice Management. I would love to add different widgets to different web pages with more context pre-filled. E.g. demo request, bug and feature suggestions are all different request types that live in the same project. I don't want our customers to go over the list every time they see the popup. 

[Cooper Latham]

Any plans on adding select customer details fields (phone number, location, etc.) to the customers' profile within the self service portal? Allowing the customer the ability to update their own data would be beneficial. 

Love the feature thus far! 

[jriccardo]

Where is the data for these custom Organization fields stored.   That is which table?  I have ODBC connectivity to both JSM and Jira Software and cannot locate where this data resides.   

Thanks

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

Hi all,

I wanted to provide an update - many of these features are now available.

@Leonardo Boldrini these features are now available in Free and Standard.

@Majken Longlade APIs are now available to sync fields from Hubspot or any other system.

You can find more information here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management-articles/Announcing-new-Customer-Service-capabilities-across-all-Jira/ba-p/2533520

Cheers!