How to set up Service Desk when supporting in multiple languages and using knowledge base

[Robert]

Hi!

We are using cloud. Our agents use one service desk project to support our clients. The agents provide support in multiple languages, as we have customers in many countries.

I started to introducing a knowledge base and I need a good service desk portal, but after reading many articles, it looks like not possible to do what I need. Here is why:

• The customer portal can be translated, but the knowledge base can not. So to have our clients a self service KB in the portal I need as many SD project as many language I support. Why I need this? Because only one portal can be configured for a single project. At this point SD portal language support become an useless feature...
• OK, so I create more SD projects. But because service desk is designed to work with queues, and queues are work inside the project only (This queue is already filtered by:), my agents require to monitor multiple queues. This will not work as we support many languages... The second problem: we need to manage multiple projects, and this is a pain...
• Next I was thinking about to have a Kanban Board, and collect all issues into a single place. Documentation says it is a Software project feature, and SD will not fully supported. Also I need to create the board on my personal profile, so I'm not sure it is a good Idea to attach it to a person.

So the question: How can I set up a customer service in the right way, where I have customers in many languages, my agents supports them also in many languages and I want to have the knowledge base feature in their languages as well, and also the portal in multiple language?

[Alessandro Distefano]

Hi @Robert 

Our add-on for Confluence Cloud can help you to build a multilingual KB on ServiceDesk/Service Management, within a single project.

Here is the marketplace link: Lango: Language and translation manager.

With Lango you can:

• Manage multiple language versions of your pages;
• Translating your content automatically via Google Translate (note: this feature requires a Google Cloud account);
• Insert a macro inside KB pages to allow your users switching languages inside SD.

For further details, you can also take a look at this article: Using Lango on Jira Service Management Knowledge Base 

If you need help or more information, don't hesitate to send us a mail or open a ticket :)

[Robert]

Hello Alessandro!

Your add-on looks like a nice solution. Before install anything, I'd like to see how my problem might be solved without extra cost. What is the best practice... if I found no answer, maybe I should consider to use it.

Thank you

[Alessandro Distefano]

Sure!
Unfortunately, Atlassian products have many flaws in handling multilingual contents. It is often necessary to use workarounds or some creative strategies :D

[Capi [resolution]]

Hi @Robert

At resolution (my employer) we have been working on solving the multiple languages requirement when a company cannot afford to have support agents covering every language their customers speak with this app: Ticket Language Detection & Translation for JSM.

It may be possible to leverage that app to have a more flexible setup to solve your conundrum and better map projects/queues/boards/KBs but honestly I would be playing in the dark without asking some specific questions first.

However, I'm happy to chat about it if that's an interesting path for you, you can ping me on LinkedIn here.

[Robert]

Hi!

We do not have issue with the language, the question here is to have the right setup. I'd like to use Jira + Confluence in the right way. I think my case isn't too special, but I have the feeling I won't get a solution out of the box without add-ons...

[Capi [resolution]]

I think you're right. In general Atlassian relies a lot on the value of customizing functionality with add-ons, so it's safe to assume that if you want to have a perfect setup, that may include some stuff from the marketplace. But it's also essential to understand how far you can go out of the box.

It'd be interesting for me to know how do you identify which language the ticket is in order to assign it to the right agent. Does each agent select the tickets in their own language? Or do you have queues by language? Have you found a way to do this?

We haven't seen an efficient way of doing that without add-ons...

[Robert]

Most probably I going to create separate projects for areas/languages with their own portals and language specific knowledge base. Then we going to have more queues as a result, but I will create a good Kanban board on top of all. At the moment I can't see better out of the box solution...

[Capi [resolution]]

Sounds like a solid plan!