Best Practice for Jira Service Desk with different departments?

[Emily Jarvis]

New to Jira and Service Desk. I've been looking for the best way to handle our setup. It's  kind of been answered, but I thought I would put this in context with how we use it and see what people's thoughts were.

We are coming from Zendesk where we have different queues. Support, Sales, Development/QA, and Internal IT. We even have 3 different email addresses. Support@companyname.com, Sales@companyname.com, and IT@companyname.com

When a ticket comes into Support and a change is needed in our products, it is turned over to Development/QA to be worked. Dev & QA don't reply to customers, they work directly with our support team. If that same customer has an issue with their payments, etc, we can assign that to Sales queue and get one of our Sales reps to reply.

We also have an IT queue that is entirely internal and for our employees to enter tickets.

Do I need to create a separate project for each queue? If I have a separate for Sales vs. Support, wouldn't that affect the customer portal?

Would it be good to keep customer-facing in one project and the Internal IT as a separate project (seeing that they have a separate project template for it?)

How are queues handled in Jira Service Desk?

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi Emily,

At our Organization we have external customers and internal IT all using Service Desk.  WE use separate service desk projects for internal vs our external customers.  I highly recommend that.

Our development does not have a service desk, they just collaborate as non-agents and have their own jira development projects.

Although it's one help portal, as long as your customers are set up to only see the service desk they should, then it's been no problem at all. 

Remember that you can only have 1 email address per 1 service desk, so that might already drive your service desk set up looking at your emails above

Don't be afraid to have many service desk projects if they are being supported by different teams.  It should be team = service desk project. 

Queues are by service desk and don't combine other service desks.  They are configurable and real-time.

If you have any other questions let me know

Susan

[Jack Brickey]

I second Susan's input. Very similar scenario to what we use.

[Emily Jarvis]

Thank you both for your input. So a follow-up on the Customer Portal the "Technical Support" would be my Support Project, but the "Licensing & Billing Questions" would be my Sales Project.

With 2 different projects, can I have just one customer portal that directs issues to the correct project depending on the request type they choose?

[Jack Brickey]

you can elect to do it either way. i suspect option 1 below is what you want but maybe not so showing two options.

Option 1: Two Projects --> One Help Center w/ two portals

this works well if the customers that will access Technical Support are different than those opening issues for L&B

• Setup two projects: Technical Support, Sales Support
• Setup Request types for each project and if desired set up groups
• Help Center URL = https://urcompany.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portals
• Technical Support portal = https://urcompany.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1
• Sales Support URL = https://urcompany.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/2

When the customer navigates to the Help Center URL they will see only two options if they are customers of both projects or only one otherwise.  Clicking on the option will take them to the portal for that project which then will show available groups/request types.

Option 2: One Project --> One Help Center w/ one portal

this works well if the customers that will access Technical Support are the same or largely the same as those opening issues for L&B

• Setup a single project: e.g. Customer Support or whatever
• Create Request types for Technical Support (General, Product Issue, etc) and place them into a group called "Technical Support"
• Create Request types for Licensing&Billing (General, Licensing, Billing, etc) and place them into a group called Licensing & Billing
• Help Center URL = https://urcompany.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portals
• Portal = https://urcompany.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1

When the customer navigates to the Help Center URL they will see only one option "Customer Support" which takes them to the portal where they will see the two groups and clicking on the group expands the list to the Request Types.

hope this helps vs. causing more confusion. :-) I highly recommend this document.

[Emily Jarvis]

Thanks again for the very thorough help. Unfortunately, our customers are one and the same whether they are submitting billing questions or customer support, technical, etc. We just have 2 different emails to separate from sales and support. I'll have to keep playing to see what we can work out.

Really appreciate the help!

[Geoff Chamberlain]

Hi Susan, I'm banging my head on the permissions setup for your scenario: internal service desk(s) for employees and external service desk(s) for your customers. Your comment "as long as your customers are set up to only see the service desk they should" is the nugget that I was hoping you'd clarify...

We have 1,300 internal staff and potentially hundreds of external customers... I would hate to have to manually add each as customers to the various service desks. For external customers, we would like for them to be able to sign up themselves on the portal... but don't want them to be able to see internal service desks.

Any suggestions? We're on the server version.

[Ryan Brownell]

There is a way to add groups of users as customers which may help with the "having to add individual customers at a time" problem.

To do this:

Go to Project Settings > People

Click the Add People button

Type the name of the group you want to add.

Select the Service Desk Customers role.