How to assign a ticket to a 'Customer'?

[svadivelu]

Hi, 

I'm looking to associate tickets in the queue with a customer name so we are able to sort open tickets by the customer name. Currently we do not have customers setup and I'm having trouble with this configuration. 

Hoping you can provide the best practice for configuring customers and assigning tickets to a particular customer name. 

Thanks,

[Mike Bowen]

Hi @svadivelu,

It is very simple actually and even though I agree with @Ajay _view26_ with the two solutions he has provided, it is important to get the basics right first before looking into plugins etc. Automation for Jira is an excellent tool and I would definitely recommend it once you've mastered the basics of Jira Service Desk. 

Assuming you are an administrator in Jira Service Desk do the following:

1. Directly under Queues is Customers, click into it. (here is the path: https://**********.atlassian.net/projects/<your-project-code>/customers
2. Replace ******** with your Atlassian domain. It will take you into the Customers page.
3. Click on Add Organizations. 
4. Give it a name and click on Add. (e.g. XXXX).
5. Click into the organization you just created.
6. Now you need to invite your customers (users) to the Customer Portal. Click on Add customers. (e.g. john.doe@xxxx.com)
7. Enter in their email address and press enter. Repeat for the next user. When you are done, click Add. (Those users added will now receive an email inviting them to the Customer Portal. Once they are signed up, they will be able to log into the Customer Portal, and click on a request type to raise a ticket). 
8. The tickets will arrive in your All Open Requests Queue. 
9. Create a new Queue and name it the Customers name (organization name), (e.g. XXXX Tickets). 
10. Edit the Queue and in the Filter by area use JQL (not basic) and paste in: status in (Escalated, Implementing, "In Progress", Open, "Peer review / change manager approval", Pending, Planning, Reopened, "Under Review", "Under investigation", "Waiting for approval", "Waiting for customer", "Waiting for support", "Work in progress", "On Hold") AND Organizations = "XXXX" ORDER BY Key DESC then SAVE. 
11. Done. Now when a signed up user in organization XXXX logs into the Customer Portal and raises a request your All Open Requests & XXXX queue will receive the ticket. (Mind you the user must share with organization in the Ticket Request Form on the Customer Portal.
12. If you have multiple customers then simply repeat the steps for each of the customers. 

Once you've mastered Customers, Queues, SLA's etc, I would definitely recommend Automation for Jira.

-Mike

[svadivelu]

Hey Mike, appreciate your response. I'm not looking to invite customers at the current moment. I need to associate all our incoming tickets with an organization so we can report against it. (ie. how many tickets from customer A)

Is organization the best option for this use case? 

I can't seem to link a ticket to an organization in the 'create' pop out window. This field is visible once the ticket is created. Is there anyway to expose this field at the time of creation?

[Mike Bowen]

Hi @svadivelu 

Okay, so who are the incoming tickets from? Where are they arriving in your All Open Requests queue (From the Portal or Email)? Is your setup open to anyone or closed by invite only? 

Organisation is customer name, they are one and the same thing. 

Can I also assume all the incoming tickets are from the same Customer? 

If you could share a screenshot of what you are doing that would help. You can blur out any sensitive info if you like. 

-Mike

[svadivelu]

Hi @Mike Bowen 

The tickets are coming from different customers (20+ currently) and also being reported by the internal team from my company on behalf of the customer. The majority of tickets are generated from our 'support@' email address but we do receive a few tickets directly from the portal. (do you recommend we steer customers to one stream over the other?)

The end goal here is to monitor, track and report tickets on a per customer basis. Presently I'm unable to answer 'how many open tickets do we have from customer X' or 'how many tickets were resolved for customer Y.'

Appreciate your help here!

[Mike Bowen]

HI @svadivelu 

Part 1: 

Okay, nice screenshot, that explains a lot and this is how we were in the beginning. 

Your 2020 goal must be to get all your customers onto the Customer Portal and logging their requests from there only. I gave our customers 3 month notice that were moving to a cloud based customer portal. I offered free demo's, training and videos showing how easy it was to use.

At the end of the day you will have a lot more control over tickets, reporting, responses, everything and your customer will have control and visibility over their tickets. 

Ditch email requests for multiple reasons: 

• It is too easy for your customer to knock out an email request to you, which means your queue will always be full. The Customer Portal is a lot easier, but because it is a form it will be that little bit slower to raise a request, which is a good thing.  (I have run our Jira Service Desk for a 14 months now and I can prove that ticket numbers have reduced as a result of the Customer Portal. It will require customer education, but you and them will be better off in the long run). 
• It is difficult to keep track of email tickets (from a customer point of view as their mailboxes get full of emails, and multiple strands of communication within the email).  
• Email requests come through as a default Request Type (email), which is fine if you only have one request type, but what if you had a Task, an Incident, Maintenance, Upgrades or help. It is definitely not ideal. 
• Labels - you can't pre-define labels on an email. You would need to add a label to the ticket after it has arrived.  Not ideal if you want to automate your Service Desk down the line.
• If a customer CC's a bunch of people on the email, and you don't have them on your Jira Service Desk, when you respond to the ticket, only the reporter gets the email notification. This was the biggest moan and grumble from our customers and a great reason for them moving to the Customer Portal.
• Reporting - As mentioned above, email requests are limited in what they report, so you are missing key fields of data (Customer Request Type, Issue Type, labels, Versions, any custom fields you might have on a form, don't appear in an email. Only Summary, Description and Attachment. 

[Mike Bowen]

Part 2: 

RE: your blank Organisation column. 

It is blank because you have not invited users to the Customer Portal, nor are they associated with an organisation. What you need to do is as follows:

1. On your Service Desk project under Customers (below queues) create a customers - Go to Customers, Add Organisation. 
2. Click into the Organisation and invite users (add the email addresses you are receiving in the ticket Reporter field). 
3. You can have multiple users in an organisation. (each user email added will receive an email from your Jira inviting them to join the Customer Portal. Massively encourage your users to sign up. 
4. Create a queue for each of the organisations you set up, this will help filter out the tickets per organisation, making it a lot easier to manage if you have agents dedicated to a particular customer. (No one likes working from the All Open Requests queue when tickets are arriving in and out, it is a psychological nightmare and also if a manager looks in the queue and sees loads of tickets they may think no one is working. This queue should be empty. 
1. Here is an example JQL script you can use for your Queue: 
   status in (Escalated, Implementing, "In Progress", Open, "Peer review / change manager approval", Pending, Planning, Reopened, "Under Review", "Under investigation", "Waiting for approval", "Waiting for customer", "Waiting for support", "Work in progress", "On Hold") AND Organizations = "XXXXX" ORDER BY Key DESC

Next time your customers emails a request in, provided you have invited them  to the customer portal, the ticket should appear in both All Open Requests and the Customer Queue, you recently set up for them, and if you have a column = organization the customer name will appear in there. 

[Mike Bowen]

Part 3:

In Summary here are some Pro's (of using the Customer Portal) and Con's (using email), which I have sent to customers as a prod to move over to the customer portal. Bear in mind a lot of customers probably use similar service desks themselves, so the move should be relatively painless. 

Pro's:

• Filtering – when a ticket request is logged via the customer portal, the tickets are automatically filtered into customer queues for our agents to pick up and work on. This makes the whole process very efficient.
• Labels – Important labels are linked to each ticket logged via the customer portal. These labels are automatically linked to reports, knowledge base posts and processes.
• Request Participants – The customer portal has an option to share the ticket with your colleagues or organisation or one can log a private request. This is setup in Jira Service Desk so is managed by us.
• Email Notifications when comments or status updates are made to a ticket – All watchers, the reporter, the assignee, the SE group will see comments and status updates when they are added via the Service Desk or Customer Portal.
  The reporter will also get an email notification when a comment or status is added to the ticket, but no one else, unless you are logged into the customer portal, then you will be able to see all the comments and status of the ticket.
• Priority – The reporter (You) set the priority of your ticket when a ticket is logged via the customer portal.
•  SLA - Tickets logged via the portal are automatically assigned a SLA and the agents can quickly can see a Commencement Time countdown.
• Ease of use - Customers have access to their queues anywhere in the world, and users can quickly see requests raised by themselves and their colleagues. 

Con's:

• Tickets created via email have to be manually queued and edited. This is very inefficient.
• Tickets created via email have no labels and they need to be manually added. This is very inefficient.
• Tickets created via email don’t take into account request participants (e.g. folk on CC), so there is a high risk your ticket is visible by one person (Reporter) only. This is not efficient for user and colleagues. 
• Currently this is how it works for tickets created via email, but given none of you are logged into the customer portal, there is a high risk you are missing out on comments, unless you are the reporter, or the last person to comment on a ticket.
• Tickets created via email have a lower priority by default and have to be manually updated by a human. This is not efficient.

Let me know if the above helps you out. 

-Mike

[svadivelu]

@Mike Bowen extremely appreciate your response and the additional context. I did run into an issue though. I have organizations setup but I wasn't able to link existing contacts with an organization. For example I have two customer contacts who have opened numerous tickets, how do I associate them to the Organization they are from? The only way to do so looks like I'll need to invite them from the org. Is that true?

[Mike Bowen]

Hi @svadivelu 

Yes, in your project, go to Customers menu, Select an existing organisation or create a new one, then add your two customer contact addresses (email addresses) by clicking om Add customers. Enter in their email addresses and create. This should associate those customers with your org. 

-Mike

[svadivelu]

Hey @Mike Bowen does that not send an invite to that email address? We have a lot of customers who already use the service desk but aren't linked to an org. I don't want them to receive an email and create confusion.

In addition to this, I noticed there is no method to automatically add an organization to a new ticket based on the user's domain name. I found a plugin that somewhat solves this issue but not perfectly. If an email is received from customer@applecomputers.ca, the plugin creates an org 'applecomputers' and tags it to the ticket even if 'Apple Computer' already exists as an organization. The plugin is called 'Automation for JIRA.'

How do you manage automatically adding organizations to a ticket? From digging around, it doesn't seem like standard JIRA functionality. 

Appreciate all your help!

[Ajay _view26_]

Jira ServiceDesk has the concept of Customer Organization to solve this use-case.  You could do it manually or use Automation for Jira