Forward ticket to external helpdesk

[Koen van Besien]

I was trialling Service Desk and had following requirement:

* Internal user sends email to helpdesk 

* Ticket is created

* Agent looks at it and sees, ok its a ticket for our third party supplier. 

* Agent forwards the ticket to the external supplier email address

* External supplier email system comes back with a ticket number

* Agent replies and goes back and forth with external supplier

* When issue is solved with external supplier comment is given to internal customer 

* If all good agent closes internal ticket.

I cannot really find a way how to deal with this using Jira service desk as there seems to be no forward ticket to email option?

[Jack Brickey]

@Koen van Besien, the key is in your 4th bullet. What do you really want to do relative to forwarding the ticket. There are various approaches to incorporating third-parties into your ticket resolution process. You can give the third-parties user accounts w/in JIRA with certain permissions that meet your needs or you can keep them completely out of the application in which case you would need another method to communicate, e.g. email. I'm not a fan of email as it makes things very manual. I would be more in favor of incorporating the third-party into JSD or JSW.

If we consider the options for incorporating them into JSD/JSW then consider how much you want to expose them to or give them access too. Here are some options:

• make them Agents of the project. This gives them full access to all issues in that project. Likely not what you want but it is nice a clean implementation. In this way you can use Components to capture the third-party and have the issues default to the third-party agent when the component is set, but there are other options here too.
• Create a separate project for the third-party, making them agents there and then from the original internal project create a linked issue in the third parties project. In this scenario the third-party has visibility and control on only their issues. You can even use Automation function to transition the original if desired which can help alert the internal project agent to take an action, e.g. close the original and add comment.
• similar to the second bullet but make the third party a Customer instead of an agent. the only advantage here is to control cost. In this scenario the third-party can't be assigned the issue and is limited to comments only so your agent will need to own the issue to closure.

hopefully these thought help you consider the best approach. BTW, you can add a custom field in in case and include the third-parties customer ticket number for reference.

[Koen van Besien]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.  The main issue is that the external party have their own helpdesk.

So what basically happens is that the agent needs to create a ticket in an external third party help desk system. We currently do that by just sending an email to their support desk which creates a ticket automatically and returns an email with the ticket number. ITs this email you use to go back and forth and when you came to a conclusion, the agent can update the internal ticket with a summary of the discussion with the external party. Hope that explains a bit what I am after. 

Its mainly that you would like to have all the communication inside of the Jira service desk so that it does not sit in one of the agents personal email accounts. 

You could of course link up the ticket number of the other helpdesk and use that to click on and do the communication (as you already mentioned) but in a perfect world you would like to have that communication in the Jira Service desk. Maybe as a "Sub ticket" or just a linked ticket but then the starting email should come from the Jira service desk I think?

Hope that explains a bit what I was after!

[Micha]

Hi Koen,

I have the exact same question. And your line is exactly saying why:

Its mainly that you would like to have all the communication inside of the Jira service desk so that it does not sit in one of the agents personal email accounts. 

It's so hard to get a good answer. Did you already manage to fix this issue? If so, could you share how you did this?

[Helpdesk Logistiek]

Hi,
Same question here, did you already find a solution for this ?

[Micha]

Hi Dave,

I a way. I am testing the add-on "Email this issue" now and seems to work. Also check this post:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Desk-questions/JIRA-Service-Desk-Can-an-external-third-party-be-involved-via/qaq-p/613105#M14521

Good luck!

[Thomas Fozzi]

Hi Dave, same problem here.

I'm also trying the Email this issue add-on. But so far I managed to use it only for outgoing emails.

For incoming email I'm using the Jira SD Mail Handle and any other Mail Handler seems to conflict.

I created the Jira user for the collaborator, and tried different configurations: create a user group with the collaborator as member and then add the group to the project, give the user access to Jira Software and/or Jira Service Desk ....

In the best case I get this message in the Mail Handler log:

"FAILURE    You do not have permission to create internal comments on this issue"

Any hints?

Thomas

[Thomas Fozzi]

Finally got it working:

• create a new account for the external collaborator and give it only access to Jira Software
• add the external collaborator account to the Project (People > Add people) with role Service Desk Team.

This way, when the collaborator sends an email, its message is appended to the issue as Internal Comment. Also, as the account doesn't have direct access to Jira SD, it doesn't consume any Jira SD Agents license.

Cons: each time an Agent needs to involve a collaborator he must ask the Administrator to create the account and add it to the project

Thomas

[Jamie Fitterer]

Looks like this is no longer available. They must have changed this as it was a loop around their paid JSD seats. 

[D OLongaigh]

This is a must-have for Jira Servicedesk.

A typical example would be where the business uses a SAAS supplier. Internally a customer logs ticket to Jira Servicedsk that needs to escalate immediately ( or on a timed basis ) automatically to the servicedesk of the external SAAS supplier. The internal support team in reality only manages the conversation and plays no real part in the resolution of the issue.

If the Jira servicedsk cannot allow this to happen - then the efficiency  of the ticket handling is cumbersome and reflects negatively on the effectiveness of the Jira Servicedesk from the customer's ( internal user's ) perspective .... & will result in poor customer satisfaction ratings .... 

How does Atlassian respond to this feature gap ?

Other servicedesks allow for this .... eg Managengine Servicedesk ....

[Marlene Kegel - codefortynine]

Hi @D OLongaigh ,

One of our customers uses Deep Clone for Jira as escalation tool.

You can read more about this use case here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Desk-articles/Escalate-tickets-in-Jira-Service-Desk-with-Deep-Clone-for-Jira/ba-p/1244255