Is your company using Jira Service Desk outside of IT?

[Molly Bronstein]

Hi Community! I'm part of the marketing team for Jira Service Desk!

We're looking for companies using Jira Service Desk for innovative use cases such as HR, Legal, Finance, Marketing, etc. Let us know! The more details the better. 

[Jan-Peter Rusch]

Hi,

our purchasing department is split up in two teams: Purchasers & backoffice analysts. We use JSD with the analysts as agents & the purchasers as customers. The purchasers create defined issues explaining the exact analysis of a supplier pricelist attached as a file to the issue.

As the result of the analysis is needed in many departments, the issue is documented in Confluence. On creation a page is created & updated on changes on the issue until closed. Attachments (Original & the result) are automatically moved to the Confluence page. 

Jira is for the process / Confluence for documentation & archiving.

[LeKisha Boswell]

Great way to use the tool outside of the realms of the help desk.

[nsinghunfpa]

Hi @Molly Bronstein,

We are a UN agency and using JIRA Core to automate smaller business processes (internal). We recently launched a portal where our colleagues from various country offices can request emergency funds. There are various level of approval involved. This is also helping us in tracking where exactly the request is, how long did each step took and identify the bottlenecks. It's been almost 6 months and it seems to be serving us well. We have now started automating other processes as well. We realized that it would be expensive to customize this process in ERP instead we used connectors to interact with our ERP system.

[Monique vdB]

Pinging @Meg Holbrook, @M Amine, @Jack Brickey, and @Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_ who all may have thoughts!

[Jack Brickey]

All of my use cases are currently internal. We may ultimately use for customer service but today they are using Freshdesk and I haven't had much luck switching them out but haven't really pushed either. I'm currently using JSD for the following internal scenarios:

• IT
• Facilities
• HR Staffing

I recently considered using it to connect into a customer portal that we developed. Customer can click "feedback" button and it opens an issue via email. However, I opted to go directly into JSW project rather than JSD.

I also briefly looking into using for purchasing but in the end the internal customer found they could accomplish via our ERP system.

[Walter Buggenhout]

I have several use cases, both internal as from customer implementations. I am passing them on personally, @Molly Bronstein.

[M Amine]

Hello everyone,

Lately, I have been helping a client was wondering if Jira Service Desk could help in order to manage his Compliance department processes. 

In short, all departments had to make frequent (either weekly or monthly) checks, fill in excel sheets and then send them to the Compliance departments for approval. With Jira Service Desk and Automation for Jira we made an advanced Proof of Concept (POC) in less than two days and the client's top management were very satisfied. So they decided to take Jira Service Desk and not the alternative. 

Internally we mainly use Jira Service Desk or HR. But we are planning to use it in a variety of other fields. 

Will get back to this thread afterwards with some awesome Use-cases.  

cheers

[Molly Bronstein]

Yes! Let us know when JSD spreads to other teams within your org!

[Meg Holbrook]

Hey Molly, 

There are a few teams I have onboarded to JSD recently that are not IT departments. Our organization is a mortgage banker, and we currently have these non-IT teams utilizing JSD:

- Training: Using JSD to manage user process and workflow questions. Internal inquiries only.

- Mortgage Servicing: Interfacing with customers whose loans are owned and serviced by our organization, providing feedback for general questions, connecting with vendors for servicing transfers. Internal and External inquiries. 

- Compliance Team: Same as the training team. Internal inquiries only. 

In my mind though, the Training and Compliance desks we employ right now are more in the realm of IT break/fix solutions. 

[Rob Driessen]

Hi Molly,

within our company there are three physical "helpdesks": at IT Support, at Facility and at HR. IT support is the one department using JSD and its customer portal. We have just started exploratory talks to see if we can 'onboard' the other two departments too, so they can move away from their Mantis-based solution and their shared mailbox - respectively.

I hope in the end we can make things easier for our internal customers by having a single "Helpdesk" intranetpage from which tickets can be raised at either IT, Facility or HR.

[Meg Holbrook]

Rob, I think this is awesome and have done something similar at my organization for our Compliance, Training, and Mortgage Servicing teams. 

I will say that it's incredibly hard to sway some people away from the shared mailboxes, but it is absolutely worth it. Gone are the days of people 'losing' emails or not knowing what statuses outstanding items are. 

The move from a reactive desk to a proactive is such a satisfying feeling! Best of luck to you.

[Rob Driessen]

Well, it took some time, effort and a new hire, but..... it's happening!

Starting Jan 1st 2019, we should have a three-in-one support page that will help our employees find their way to the portals for HR, Facility and IT

[Clint Young]

Hey Molly,

I definitely want to keep an eye on this discussion. I just posted about using Service Desk for general marketing requests. Most of our web team uses it currently, and I'm slowly bringing in design requests into the mix.

I am looking forward to more marketing focused comments on here.

[Molly Bronstein]

Hi Clint - yes, I just saw your other post about marketing teams in JSD. We're working on finding some customers who have used JSD for marketing or legal successfully because your question is starting to come up more frequently.

Our internal teams here at Atlassian use JSD to field requests and we find that it works very well for teams outside of IT/dev but of course customer use cases would be more useful :) 

Hopefully we'll have more comments on this thread soon so check back!

[Clint Young]

Does Atlassian have a blog post(s) that breaks down how your marketing team uses JSD in detail?

[Molly Bronstein]

Unfortunately, not at the moment. JSD "outside of IT" will be a larger focus for us going forward so I'm sure we'll have a blog post soon! I will update this thread when we do. 

[Bill Cushard]

@Clint Young Our marketing team uses Jira Service Desk to take all kinds of requests from people in our company. Here is a snippet from my book with a short list of request types we use. I hope it helps you decided how to use JSD.

[Clint Young]

@Bill Cushard Thanks for the comment. I think I might just have to get myself a copy of your book. How in depth do you go in regards to Confluence integration with Jira Software and JSD?

[Bill Cushard]

@Clint Young I go to the depth of concepts, not specific configurations. In other words, I describe how to set up request types like the ones describes about...what fields you might have, what queues you might have them go to, etc. But I don't show screen shots. 

There are three chapters in the middle of the book:

• How we set up Jira Software
• How we set up Confluence
• How we set up Jira Service Desk

But I didn't really cover any technical integrations, like how to create application links, etc. I do talk about, for example, how confluence pages can be integrated with JSD on the portal to help self-service. But again, I talk about it conceptually not at the feature level (features change too quickly). 

Does that help?

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi Molly,

Actually our first implementation of Service Desk was for our External customers.  In some ways it was easier than the internal IT implementation that we did next.  Our company is a software company that has licensed and hosted software solutions.  We now support a large number of our customers via Jira Service Desk.  Our customers love it for it's simplicity and ease of use.  Our internal users(agents) love it because it's still Jira. 

Hope that helps...

Susan

p.s. just did my 2nd talk on this implementation at the London User Group, and have submitted the talk for consideration for Euro Summit

[Nora Bylsma]

Hi Molly! Currently I am trying to setup JSD for our small tech consulting company. We are hoping to use JSD for our external customers to submit project, maintenance, and feature requests. I am interested to know how you use this with your external customers and if are situations are similar I would love some insight in how you manage tracking incoming requests from your different customers. 

[Molly Bronstein]

Hi Nora - JSD is definitely compatible for the external customer use case. 

Here are some quick articles with some details to help you get started: https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/get-set-up-for-customer-service-930021998.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/best-practices-for-software-teams-using-jira-service-desk-930021997.html

When setting up a new Project in JSD, there is actually a "Customer Support" template that helps you get started with some out-of-the-box workflows and issue types. But I'm sure the experts in this thread can help you with more detailed questions :) 

[Sergey Sukhaninskiy]

Hi

I work in bank and inside all use JIRA. But for more friendly interface, we create Telegram bot for create tickets and write/receive comments. Some do not even know that they are using JIRA. =)

[Victor Ramirez]

I'd love to hear more about this.

Can you share any tutorial links?

[KRC]

Hi @Molly Bronstein

Am a TPM(consultant) in one of America's big telecom company. We use JSD as an intake portal where internal marketing campaign teams submit new campaign request and it gets triaged and approved in JSD, once approved a JIRA issue will be created in JIRA Business Project where campaigns will be tracked and get executed.

[Clint Young]

@KRC - So you use one JIRA Business Project for all of your campaigns or do you create a JBP for each campaign that gets approved? I'm interested in further exploring how you use JSD along with other Atlassian products. Thanks for the comment.

Best,

Clint

[KRC]

Hey @Clint Young

So I designed it to use one JBP for all campaigns. So each campaign will be a single issue with multiple subtasks in it, let's say--- Design approval, legal approval,  etc etc.

As soon as a JSD campaign gets approved, I used some scripts and some inbuilt options to automate issue creation in JBP and once an issue in JBP is closed, JSD issue will be marked as closed or resolved.

Also resolving subtasks if the parent is resolved

Some automation to create multiple subtasks under each new campaign issue in JBP(set of predefined subtasks which will be common for all campaigns)

Custom notification emails, weekly reporting, dashboards etc 

[Susan Ostreicher]

I work in product management (where the product is custom market research). We use JSD internally to support our sales and client service teams.

A lot of requests are about how to use internal applications, or troubleshooting problems with them. But we also answer general questions about our research services - best practices for selling them, designing them, interpreting the results, etc. 

Prior to JSD, we were using a shared inbox for this purpose, but it was impossible to get any kind of insight into our workload, turnaround time, or satisfaction. Moving to an actual service desk platform has been a huge leap forward. We also use Confluence for documentation on all of the topics above, so we love the ability to integrate the two tools.

[Maarten Cautreels]

Our Marketing Operations team is using it to support our Call Center Operators. They can use a Jira Service Desk portal to report issues or questions they get from actual customers or give feedback about the documentation, process, tools, etc.

The team then uses a Kanban board to work on these issues, assign the work to the correct team lead and resolve it asap. They're super happy with this easy to setup and simple to use workflow.

[Salman Muhammad]

We use it for:

IT

HR

Facilities

Business Intelligence

Scheduling (clients)

Project Intake

[Megan Filbin]

Hi @Molly Bronstein! 

We use our JSD as a tool for site health. We have determined several metrics that certify pages as healthy, and when they fall below the healthy threshold our internal software sends an automated email to the service desk. 

[Molly Bronstein]

Wow! This is a really unique use case!!

[UF ICBR]

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[Gretchen Linder]

Hi @Molly Bronstein,

We use Jira to track the development of materials (both online and print) by two, separate  marketing communications teams.  Within the workflow, approvals both internally and externally from the department are managed through Jira.  Overall the Jira workflow supports the marketing process end-to-end from intake (request) through execution (publication).

-g.

[Molly Bronstein]

Hi Gretchen - this is super interesting! Just to confirm, these marketing comms teams use Jira Service Desk as a portal for other teams to submit online and print requests? And then do these requests feed into Jira Software once the ticket is being worked on? Or is all of this done in Jira Software?

[Gretchen Linder]

Hi Molly!

Requests originate from teams outside of JIRA user base via email, meeting, etc.  Then, the project manager will create an issue in JIRA to track the request. For example, somebody needs a flyer. In JIRA, the workflow will guide the work through the various steps of creation, approvals and publication - making assignments to various resources to complete the work through transition screens and status updates.

Does that make sense?  Hope it answers your question. :)

-g.

[Charnae Wall]

We run a website design and development business and have been using SD for all our clients for over a year now.

Its worked really well in cases where they raise severity 1, 2 & 3 issues. The problematic bit has been when they have a backlog of enhancements, they have no way of prioritizing items so we shift those over to Jira and use a sprint board. 

The other painful bit is setting up each new service desk with it's custom request types! 

[Nora Bylsma]

Hi Charne, Do you setup new service desks for each of your customers?

[Charnae Wall]

Yes. 

[Nora Bylsma]

With using separate boards are you able to keep anonymity between your customers? We have several NDAs with our customers so we wouldn't want them "seeing" each other and I noticed that when I create new boards they all show on the portal. Is there a way you are getting around that or is there a setting I am missing?

[Charnae Wall]

Hi Nora, I've not been able to view boards through the portal, but when we need clients to interact with the boards, we give them a jira login, this does get a bit tricky, i'm actually still struggling with permissions at the moment and what they can and shouldn't see. Sounds like we're in the same boat.

[Curtis]

We are just rolling out JIRA Service Desk to replace our current product for our IT and Facilities departments. It will also roll out to our eCommerce and IS groups, which currently have no tool to manage incoming issues. In our Phase 2, we will then roll out to our Agent Support group and Foundation groups so they can manage their incoming requests. Phase 2 will also consist of  our HR On-boarding process to be managed in JIRA.

These are just the uses currently planned on our roadmap. Once these are done, and successful, I am sure more groups will come out of the woodwork with the desire to come aboard.

-Curtis

[Molly Bronstein]

I'd love for you to keep me updated on your progress as you roll out JSD! If you don't mind me asking, what tool are you currently using for IT and Facilities that you're replacing?

[Curtis]

We are currently using ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.

Last year, I brought in Confluence, which is now used by our IS, IT and eCommerce teams. The eCommerce group near the same time also started using JIRA Software to manage their projects. I also brought in Bitbucket and Bamboo to be used by our QA group to build out Automated testing. The eCommerce group also made the move to use Bitbucket. Now, the Java Development (IS) team is making plans to move to Bitbucket by the end of the year along with JIRA Software to manage their Projects.

JIRA Service Desk just made sense with its clean interface and integration's with the rest of the development line. It made one less product to learn and manage since JIRA Software and Service Desk operate similarly and on the same platform.

-Curtis

[Deleted user]

We use it in mortgage industry internally in a number of areas, with the common goal to eliminate the email way of walking invoices/requests through the approval chain. it has been quite successful since

1) the need for printing and shuffling papers from one desk to another has been 100% eliminated

2) the approval mechanism and queues make it super easy for approvers to know what's pending for them

3) An auditable trail of who did what when, good for internal accountability and also external auditors

4) able to identify where the bottlenecks are since I've added time in/out of each status...

5) The uncertainty factor is gone, it's always quite clear where any request is in the process

[Rob Roach]

Hi Molly,

We are a national research facility (synchrotron).  We're starting to use it on a number of fronts.  One of the biggest ones is organizational incident and problem management.  ITIL processes lend themselves nicely to everyone else's world.  Highlights so far:

1. Managing 3D printer job requests and submissions.

2. Created electronic version of a paper based 'Logbook' for floor safety coordinators.

3. Organizational Incident and Problem management system.

4. IT Service Desk *and* project management (interesting one here).

The skies the limit!

[Michiel Schuijer]

Hi,

We at TomTom International are using (JIRA Software Server DC-edition) with Service Desk for:

- Purchasing: currently one project for a team that handles the internal purchasing process that used to be all email and part SAP. The project is using a lot of custom fields but has only one request type for the customers and 2 additional issue types (Task and Sub-task) to be used for the agents internally among each other.

- Device Management: a project for requesting a loan device for developers to test apps/programming on (mainly navigation devices, but can be any mobile device since the apps can run almost anywhere). Some straight-forward request types to 'request a device for loan' and 're-assign a device' (to re-assign a borrowed device to someone else).

- External company desks: we have several service desk projects for various external customers/partners we work with so they can report issues or make requests for non-IT related matters. Map related and such.

- Greater in Legal project: a service desk project for our legal department where they handle account requests for a legal system. One request type for customers, several issue types for internal (agent) task handling.

- HR service portal: a service desk that is currently being developed for HR to receive requests and questions that used to go via email. This is still under construction.

There are a couple of projects up-and-coming that are also not IT-related and are still in the planning/design phase.

Regards

Michiel

[Linda Terrell]

Hi

We use JIRA SD for:

• Libraries
• Records management
• Accounts
• Science business units
• Security
• Resource booking
• HR
• Web development
• Contract Adminsitration
• Global business unit
• Staff feedback

Cheers

[Glau Czarnota]

Hi There,

we use JSD for:

updating our website, with possible legal impact

new campaigns

staff feedback

requests on logins for different software

[Sonya Goldstein]

Molly,

We are a Healthcare IT company that offers Medication management, adherence and Care Collaboration solutions to our healthcare customers and partners.  Although we are recently now utilizing service desk internally for our internal corporate IT and Admin departments, our primary use of Service Desk has been as the customer portal and helpdesk application utilized by our Support team to support our large customer base of doctors, hospitals and partners.

Because we are in the healthcare space, we need to pay special care to HIPAA compliance and secure handling of all customer data.  We utilized the Data Center Server product since we need to host in house and needed the redundancy to ensure that our helpdesk is up 24/7 year round.  

As we continue in our adventure, I run into multiple challenges since Atlassian advertises that Service Desk is "customer facing" but many features and reporting capabilities are not geared to those of us who are truly external customer facing.  

I am struggling with determining how I can provide the customer facing Knowledge Base linked to our support portal to my external customers without creating 6000+ (and growing) Confluence accounts, licensing all of those customer accounts but still being able to restrict access to customers who authenticate into Service desk.  Making our Knowledge base access anonymous and therefore searchable on the public web means that we cannot fully populate our self help knowledge base with truly helpful info that should only be available to customer and is proprietary information. 

If anyone out there in the community or Atlassian knows how to handle that quandary, please do reach out and contact me!

I am also willing to share and collaborate with others ( i saw those in the banking industry) with how they have configured and provide support through Service Desk to an external customer base.

sgoldstein@drfirst,com

[Michiel Schuijer]

Hi Sonya,

You wrote:

"I am struggling with determining how I can provide the customer facing Knowledge Base linked to our support portal to my external customers without creating 6000+ (and growing) Confluence accounts, licensing all of those customer accounts but still being able to restrict access to customers who authenticate into Service desk"

That is just the point of Jira Service Desk: you can use the setting:

Access | Viewing

Define who can view knowledge base articles through the portal and in the linked Confluence space.

1. All active users and customers can access the knowledge base without a Confluence license.
2. Only licensed users who have access to the space

Customers can be set up (registered in Jira) with just an email so they don't need a Jira license and also no Confluence license.

So, unless you want customers to be able to click/follow through to Confluence you can still present kb articles (Confluence content) to them.

We are currently not working much with truly external facing customers (just some B2B ones) so I don't know if I can mean much to you and hope sme others will contact you to share their experiences.

Kind regards, success

Michiel

[Sonya Goldstein]

@Michiel Schuijer- thank you for your reply.   It is these setting choices that seem to be the issue?  Does either of these allow customers without a confluence license consumed and account needing to be created in confluence to be able to click on and read the suggested article for the linked knowledge space?  We want to remove anonymous access to these articles that expose this info to the general public.  Our customer accounts for service desk are a separate set from our internal company users of JIRA, Service Desk (teams servicing the requests) and Confluence

Specifically, I do want them to be able to click on the article when it is suggested to them during search or during entry of keyword into the summary of the issue reporting form on the service desk customer portal.  Customer experience should be that they authenticate into Service Desk and when they click on a suggested article, they are not forced to again type a username/password.  Customers do not know that there is actually another product (Confluence) providing that information and will quickly move away from utilizing these articles if we make this a confusing, onerous task.  They will simply continue with entering the issue OR call our call center which defeats the entire purpose of self service.  I am hoping that there is in fact a configurable solution out there!  

[Michiel Schuijer]

HI Sonya, I'm not sure I follow you exactly but let me try with some more feedback:

"The permissions you set in Confluence determine whether (or not) your agents can create articles and if your customers can view them. "

So you would need to make sure that articles (pages) in Confluence are / aren't restricted if you want customers to find/see them or not.

Scenario 1: If you set 'anonymous access permissions' to yes in the Confluence space (don't set restrictions on pages) AND set the "All active users and customers can access the knowledge base without a Confluence license." in JIRA service desk options then this would allow Jira Service Desk customers without a JIRA license and without Confluence license to see the articles. If they first click an article it will take them to the article in a small window, but links in the article and such will launch Confluence and they will not be able to login to the Confluence server obviously as they don't have an account there and no license.

Scenario 2: When you restrict space permissions in Confluence to allow only people with an account to view content then the articles/pages will not be shown in the Jira Service Desk.
In this scenario you will need to give people a Confluence and Jira account (and license the account) and the account in Confluence should also exist in Jira (replicate the same user directory - various options are possible LDAP/CROWD) so the articles/pages will be presented to them. This scenario will cost you licenses in both applications.