Resolve this issue now defaulting to "Add internal note" instead of "Reply to customer"

[Wendy]

Every time I resolve a customer request, the default behaviour is now to create an Internal note instead of a response to a customer. If the agent doesn't notice this, and make the extra click to choose the other tab, they create an internal note by default. All the customer sees is their ticket resolved, with no explanation. Can we choose which tab is active by default somewhere? I can't find anything on it.

This is new behaviour since the new "Resolve this issue" screen was implemented, fall of 2024.

[Jehan Gonsalkorale · Accepted solution]

Hi all, 

My name is Jehan Gonsalkorale and I am a Principal Product Manager here on Jira Service Management. 

First of all, sorry to everyone who was impacted by this. We should have let you know upfront and will make sure we inform you next time we roll out changes like this. 

I'll provide some context: this behaviour was changed as we modernised the transition issu experience. We made the decision to make commenting consistent in the issue view and transition issue experience. 

We spoke to partners and customers and they said they preferred internal comments as the default because it made it harder to accidentally share things that were intended to be kept within the team with the customer. 

That said, I can see that this is causing issues for many of you. While I'm not able to make changes immediately (changing it back will cause issues with the many customers who prefer this behaviour), I will come back to this in January and will see if there is some kind of fix we could implement. 

Sorry once again for the inconvenience, 

Jehan Gonsalkorale

Principal Product Manager, Jira Service Management

[James Nelson]

Jehan,

Thanks for this note.  It helps some to see some communication from Atlassian and I appreciate your honesty.    

Willingness to please some customers with a change that knowingly impacts the workflow of all customers is a decision that, in itself, can be picked apart.  But to add to that, we were made to run into a wall (several times in some cases) and spend time researching before we figured it out.  How many customers had to hit a wall I wonder.

We would never allow this from our own internal IT departments.

We find ourselves in the "Not Valued" column in your customer database. 

How do we get into the Valued column?

[ABF]

We really need this flexibility to change this to Reply for customer as current solution does not works for us.

Best,

ABF

[Geff Hanoian]

For the record this answer is NOT accepted.  Why is that even happening?

Really basic logic problem:

1. customer submits ticket
2. we resolve ticket
3. customer has no idea because default Is to not tell the customer

[Anne Saunders]

Our organization wants the default to be internal, so that it's harder to accidentally send messages to customers. 

It seems like this should be something an admin sets per instance or per project.

[Brendon]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale

Just wanted to check back in since it's the middle of January and see if you had any updates on this, it's clearly impacting quite a few individuals negatively. 

What are the next steps for this?

[Oliver Mørch]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale

Is there an update on this one? 

[Lassi Puolakka]

Having the option to select the default way of commenting (internal note or comment to the customer) would also be really helpful for our support service people. Previously it was comments by default, and that's the main way our support service uses the feature, so it would be really good to have the option to change it back the way it was.

[James Rickards _Spark-Nel_]

Thank you @Jehan Gonsalkorale  for the comment.

As it is January, are we able to have an update as to whether this feature will be configurable?  It will need to be set on a per-screen basis for JSM.

[Ardjan Besse]

This is indeed a irritating 'feature'. We have sent several comments or 'requests for info' out where the requester received the notification, but not what we needed him/her to answer.

The default option should be able to be configured in the definition of the screens, or the whole area of the comment field should be colored like in the history: pale yellow when the comment goes to internal only, no background when it is a comment to the user.

[Brendon]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale Today is the last day of January, just wanted to check in and see if we could have an update today.  Our team is eagerly anticipating an update.  

I gather a few others around here are as well.

[Ted Hewitt]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale We just upgraded from the free to standard plan to add more agents to our team. Is that enough for us to get into the preferred customer's club yet?

[Aske Jepsen]

Looks like there is a temporary solution to the problem, go under "Personal Jira settings" and disable this "feature"

[Brendon]

@Aske JepsenBumping this reply, we've had this workaround in place all week and had all our agents change this setting. 

100% success with this option.  

Now if only we could apply this at an Administrator level.

[James Nelson]

Well this is still a problem.  I went into personal settings today and found the toggle to disable this lame 'feature' and a dialog box popped up.  We can only disable it for 8 weeks and it will come back on and run us into a wall again!  Set a reminder.

[Brendon]

@James NelsonThank you for pointing that out!  

[Wendy]

I'm worried it isn't a "reset every 8 weeks" thing, but rather a "we will no longer support the old experience after February 2025" thing. 

[Ted Hewitt]

😭

[Dena Campasano]

Amazing, thank you.  I sent this to all our agents across our 11 support teams.

[Mark B Wager]

Here's a suggestion for Atlassian -->
 

---

BEFORE changing how the system already works...

How about YOU (Atlassian) CREATE A TICKET and "GATHER INTEREST".

Then, over time, WE will VOTE on it.  And then, when WE, the community, decide there's enough votes, WE WILL decide IF and WHEN we will allow YOUR CHANGE to be implemented.
 

---

What does everyone think? 

Mark
 

Note: Sorry for the snarky-ness, but I subscribe to a LOT of these kinds of tickets and some days I get overwhelmed with frustration and despondent when I hear SO MANY of us asking fixes (often for "features" and changes we didn't ask for) that never seems to come.  Today is one of those days. :-(

[David Israel]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale There's a bunch of things I don't recall:

"We spoke to partners and customers and they said they preferred internal comments"

1. Neither spoke someone with my organisation or me, nor would I have have given this type of feedback.
2. I also don't recall ANY comms by Atlassian.

Ok, that's the formal part of the user experience, and to put it very mildly, this alone is 'unpleasant' already. I do not feel as an appreciated customer, here - apart from the hundreds of Ks we're spending on your eco system.

What seriously makes me doubt the competence of anyone

• asking for this so-called 'feature' as a non-changeable default
• approving this for implementation (!)

is this:

JSM is a SERVICE DESK. It has a CUSTOMER PORTAL. It is intended for COMMUNICATION with CUSTOMERS. Why for anyones sake such a system should default to comms that are NOT VISIBLE TO CUSTOMERS???

Just because some of your partners and customers cannot guarantee for due diligence of their employees which info to share and which not?

Seriously, I'm lacking of the appropriate words :(

[Geff Hanoian]

+1

[Ted Hewitt]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale 

Basically you just told every client of Atlassian, apart from the 5 largest customers you have, they don't matter to you. Cool cool, thanks.

[Tyler Schmidt]

x2

[Paul Evans]

+1

[Wendy]

Hi everyone, I found this open issue gathering interest for Jira development: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-14319

Please go there and vote for it if you haven't already. The Resolve screen itself also has a "Give feedback" button in the top right corner next to the close X button, so you may want to give your feedback to Atlassian there as well. 

[Mark B Wager]

Good idea!

[Dena Campasano]

Awful Change Management, making a change that negatively impacts so many organizations while pleasing some.

You should have made this configurable instead, or not make a change at all.

[Geff Hanoian]

And who in their right mind would change service desk (clearly a b2c product) to default to response type CRICKETS ...

[Michael Lykke]

Yes, please change this back to customers per default. (or allow us to switch it around as we like somewhere)

[Tyler Saddington]

This change is just hideous, it's significantly impacted my teams workflow and meant that several users have missed vital communications. Jira is priced like a premium product, maybe consider acting like a premium company instead of doing undocumented changes in the dark.

[Geff Hanoian]

+5000000000000  

it's lunacy to have "resolve" to a SERVICE DESK get resolved with NO correspondence with the customer by default.  They are PUBLIC users.  This default would be basically giving the customer a "CRICKETS", aka lack of response.  AWFUL experience for the end user.  Giving the impression we, the service provider, were NOT responding at all.

Maybe instead of changing the default you ADD a setting that defaults to what we HAD and then allows someone to change the default to "internal" note, either at the workflow level or the user level.  There are many better options than what was done alleging atlassian knows best what we want.

[Kelly Phillips]

Hi

I'm confused, there are 2 answers that have been accepted, but I can't see where any fix/resolution has been given.

Is there something we can do about this as it is annoying and makes it look like we've (Jira administrators) have made changes in the configuration when we haven't.

Thanks

Kelly

[Brendon]

Aske Jepsen was kind enough to share a work around on Jan 3, but EACH agent will be required to go into their personal settings to make the update.  It seems to be a nice workaround but not a solution as it means using legacy settings.  I hope the system is updated soon.

[James Nelson]

AND the setting is temporary!  

[Vejey Gandier]

This is frustrating. Give your customers the power or option to turn off this "FEATURE", who nobody wants. While I understand you are pleasing your high gross billable clients, You should have figured out a option to turn this OFF. Remember, you are making a breaking change! Stop forcing things! Atlassian this is Product Management 101. 

Now, back to the ask. When are we going to get an option to turn off. Remember, we choose Jira for the customizability part of it.

[Ted Hewitt]

When are we going to get the option? Id be happy if Jira or @Jehan Gonsalkorale simply responded. The silence shows they have given us their answer. This is it. We need to adapt and adjust our teams to deal with this new 'feature'.

[Brendon]

Our customers are also experiencing negative encounters as agents close tickets as they always have, and the comments they leave are internal by default and not public.   We're able to retrieve those comments only after receiving negative feedback from our customers.   This default change should have an override but no such tool exists.

[Ziv Sela]

We just encountered this new behavior after a customer complaint.

Would very much appreciate a fix to return the default to "Reply to customer"

[Alexander Ray]

Also having this issue.  Profoundly annoying change.

[Christel Gray]

Same for us. I'm constantly having to go back and double check that I selected the correct visibility. I haven't figured a way to change this yet.

[Morgan Ross]

Hi this has also become an issue for our team as our service desk members are unintentionally reply with internal note meaning customers are not privy to the work that has been done.
We are working around this for now, but this must be returned to previous functionality or provide a option to switch the default comment type.

[Joseph Chung Yin]

@Wendy -

Welcome to the community.  By default, when an issue is resolved by the agent, it should not add an internal comments unless your site/project has customization (i.e. WF transition) where comments is required before one can resolve the issue).

In our env, we enforce the rule where when issue moves into the RESOLVED status, we require a comment to be enter.  Where agent are trained to add in the notes and decide if the comment is to be shared with customer or internal only.

Can you provide clarification on what internal note that you are seeing?  

Please advise.

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

[Wendy]

Yes, it is requiring a comment to be entered, which is fine. However, the former workflow defaulted that comment to Reply to customer. Ever since the new Resolve this Issue dialogue box was implemented, the default active tab on the Comment field is Add internal note. Unless we notice and remember to select the other tab, we keep resolving our service tickets without our response going to the customer. 

Is there a way we can configure the default active tab to be Reply to customer, as it was before?

[Mark B Wager]

Hi Wendy

I've noticed the same thing. Atlassian rolled out a new "feature" for transitioning screens. This affects the comments and causes the form to default to "Add Internal note".  It was originally controlled in "Features" and you could turn it off, but I just checked that that is missing. I think the rolled out to my system on 9/5/24.

This is NOT good as it is causing my JSM users (including myself) to post comments that end up as INTERNAL and so NOT being sent to customers.  BAD BAD BAD!

There was some other traffic on the forums. I'll see if I can find it and post back here.

Mark

[Wendy]

Hey Mark,

The resolve screen does have a feedback button, so I also provided feedback using that. Hopefully they fix it soon, it's driving me batty! 

[Drishti Maharaj]

This new feature is very frustrating. There are a few cases where I forget to set it to be shared to the external customer and now the customer cannot see the comment but I know for a fact that I had made the comment.

It was better before when it defaulted to external. Now it is just an extra admin step that many agents forget to do.

[Jerrad Hermann]

This is annoying the hell out of me and my team. Years of "muscle memory" when resolving tickets is now backwards and we're constantly resolving them accidentally with internal comments now, requiring extra time and effort to review them and send out additional user facing comments on those we mess up on.

There definitely needs to be a way to change this. 

[James Nelson]

I was wondering why I was looking like an idiot to my testing team.  I was resolving issues and adding internal comments unknowingly.  Atlassian should not make a change like this without calling it out in a big way and making sure we can alter the default.

[Ben Wilbers]

Any update?

[Ian Barrow]

suffering the same problem here too.

[Joe]

This is very frustrating.  Is there an update on the fix? 

I'm not sure how many companies want to 'add internal note' instead of replying to the customer when closing a ticket, but it seems like it would be a small minority.  

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi all, 

I am very aware that this is an inconvenience to you and would like to apologise for not rolling out this change with more notice. 

To make this easier, we are going to let you opt-in to have the behaviour reverted for three months. 

The goal is for this to give you more time to manage the change on your end. We will also review the feedback to see whether we will be able to create a flag that lets you set this behaviour within one of our settings pages. This is not something we currently plan on doing, but we will revise the decision before we make the call to revert the behaviour and will, of course, keep you informed. 

Please read this Community post for more details or simply click here to sign up. 

Once again, sorry for the inconvenience, we will make sure we handle these changes better next time, letting you know ahead of time. 

Best regards,

Jehan Gonsalkorale

Principal Product Manager, Jira Service Management

[Ian Barrow]

this is waht i get when i click in the community post link

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Sorry @Ian Barrow , does this link work? https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Community-Leaders-articles/Changes-to-transition-screen-comment-behaviour-in-Jira-Service/ba-p/2941474

[Ian Barrow]

same "nothing to see here" page.

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Sorry, I just realised I'd posted it in a private group. Here is the updated link. 

[Michael Lykke]

Why don't you just make it an option for the users to decide which way they want it to work ? - that's what all wants.

Just make a switch in the settings to allow us to change it around to our liking - and not just for 3 months time. (so we don't have to keep going back to change it)

What is keeping you from doing that ? - both camps will be happy to select and work whatever way they like - seems pretty straight forward to me.

[Laura Jackson]

I guess Atlassian and Microsoft share the same playbook on introducing "new" features that are actually a step backwards and not forward.

[Ted Hewitt]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale LOL you read all of these comments and was like "na dawg, we don't care about what you guys want" Then you just lowered your shades and thought to your selves "deal with it". 

Its literally harder, in every way, to implement an account toggle to keep the old method available and usable for 3 months than it would be to create an actual account toggle to allow us the option of choosing which default is selected on the popup window.. thats right, a simple default selection on a form element that can be changed with a user click.. or JS script that auto selects what you want as a user..

I mean really!? This is a forced business flow that Atlassian is making every single client conform to the way they want to do business.. and for what reason? none. You could let us make our own choice on this VERY VERY simple account configuration setting.. Why? why would you not allow us to make our own choices.. what do you know that we don't? what else is coming? 

such a joke

[James Nelson]

 @Jehan Gonsalkorale  You reply fast and even apologize for a poor UX when you post a bad link but you don't want to talk when you upset so many with a very poor UX decision that impacts everyone's workflow and costs your customers time and money?  Instead create a post elsewhere.  Good to know you read all these comments.   

[Geff Hanoian]

First of all - this is not an "inconvenience", it's completely ridiculous workflow.  And it certainly seems like with the word choice, you're trying to piss everyone off.  Which I assume you are not, but that's definitely how it comes across.

Secondly - I can UNDERSTAND maybe making comments default to "internal".  But the RESOLVE should default to TELLING THE SUBMITTER!  If it doesn't then you have:

1. submit ticket
2. receive notice from jira it was accepted
3. PERMANENT CRICKETS!

Which is beyond stupid.

In addition it has defaulted to public for decades.  And defaulting to not communicating is NOT Intuitive for anyone.

And finally it sounds like someone at atlassian had a visit from the "Good idea fairy".

Geff

[James Rickards _Spark-Nel_]

Looking through this, Atlassian (and @Jehan Gonsalkorale ) are in a damned if they do, and damned if they don't situation.

We're all asking for the wrong solution to this problem.  The issue is that asking for any default for internal or external comments is short sighted. People will have developed a muscle memory to do it one way or the other, and any change to the default (either way) will screw this this muscle memory, and there will be upset users.

The only change that I can see where Atlassian does not end up with egg on their face is the ability to add both internal and external comments at the same time. Display both fields at once, and highlight the internal one with the same yellow as shown when viewing comments, so it is intuitive about what is public and what is internal.  Nobody's muscle memory will be screwed with.  I doubt they will do this any time soon, as it would mess with automations, workflows and a bunch of other code that assumes only one comment in a transition.

As Henry Ford once said, "If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said stronger horses".   In this case the majority of the people asked for stronger horses (i.e. default to internal) and that is what Atlassian delivered.  Hopefully they can apply a little more creativity in building what we actually need.

[Kelly Phillips]

Or just allow each tenant to choose their own settings - similar to how in Edge/Chrome you can change the order of the tabs in a window, allow administrators the ability to change the order of their comment 'tabs'.