How do portal customers vote on issues?

[Micko]

I must be missing something simple. Using organizations I can make issues visible to customers but they have no access beyond commenting. They can't vote.

There is zero point in our small team voting on issues. We need customer votes.

There is a voting and feedback plugin but it doesn't change the existing votes. It uses custom fields.

There is a feature request from 2015 (with 380 votes) but that was five years ago.

Is there any way to allow a portal customer to vote?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Customers don't get access to the issues behind their requests.

Voting is not something a service desk is expected to do - the core purpose of a service desk is for requesting help, change or bug fixes.  It's not intended as a product management system.

Customers are automatically watchers on the requests they raise, so generally you don't need them to watch issues.  If you do need customers to be notified on other people's requests, you'll need them to be added as participants (which the requestor or agents can do).  You can't get them into the "watchers" on the issue because they have no access to the issue.

[Micko]

Thanks for the explanation. Do you know if there is an Atlassian product, which does allow this without the need to buy user licenses for an unknown number of external customers?

[Micko]

- the core purpose of a service desk is for requesting help, change or bug fixes.

Finding existing changes or bug fixes and voting them into action would greatly assist this core purpose and save the customer from duplicating the request as I've done here.

A perfect solution would be to find and present existing issues as they type. Confluence Knowledge Base behaviour for issues would make the Atlassian Service Desk shine. ;-)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm not aware of any app that could enable this

[Micko]

If you do need customers to be notified on other people's requests, you'll need them to be added as participants (which the requestor or agents can do).

This is something where the customer should be in control. When would a customer ever want someone else to add them to an issue? If I see an issue and would like to be notified about changes, that's a decision for me, not for someone else. This is how it works in the screenshot from the Atlassian site.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Issues, I'm with you.  I'm less sure on watching other people's requests.  Why would I want to watch other people's requests?

Note - not issues, requests...

[Micko]

Type of issue shouldn't matter. Request, bug, support, question, feature, improvement, anything.

Sharing it should be something enabled in the back-end for any type of issue. Organisations don't really work for me. I think it confuses the customer to have this option when submitting.

I'd prefer a share with portal customers option on a service desk or software issue. From there, any customer can see the issue in their search and watch or vote or comment. Manually adding every customer to a global organisation just to share an issue is bizarre.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think you're missing the difference between a service desk and an issue tracker here.

Consider the usual service desk use-cases - imagine you're a banking client or a software end-user who has bought software - that's a very different use-case to "items-needing-work issue tracker"

[Micko]

You're right but the licensing is forcing my hand. I'd rather expose selected issues from the tracker to my customers the same as Atlassian but this isn't an option due to costs.

I'm stuck with coercing the service desk into managing access.

I can't understand why they allow anonymous access but not customer access.

It's a shame because I've moved everything into production but I'm yet to make a decision on how to handle this.

[Irina_Bel_Stiltsoft_]

Hi @Micko ,

As a workaround, you can create the Customer Case feedback portal for a JSM project or to any other Jira project and let customers create requests that will be automatically added to the relevant Jira project. In this video, I show how to set up a portal for 1 minute and what it looks like. In case JSM introduces this feature, and you want to reject the CC portal, all the ideas will stay in this project anyway. I hope it helps.

[Kristian Thomsen]

Hi we've created an add-on to support this use case:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1221630/feedback-and-voting-for-jsd?hosting=server&tab=overview

[Micko]

Oh wow! I've just noticed the feature request has changed to "In progress". This has occurred since my screenshot from yesterday. Thank you! You've made my week a lot brighter!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's good.  I've re-read my answer and realised I was explaining why it's not there yet (Atlassian's original model of a helpdesk), and missed out that I think it should be added because people are using heldesks to gather feature requests where voting can be useful.  I went to that feature request and found I'd already voted for it!