Service Desk, KB, Community/Forum, Chat - Atlassian vs. Zendesk

[Markus Raab]

Hi there,

we do want to get a new Support Portal (Service Desk) for our customers that also includes a knowledge base. Besides that we want to add a forum to let customers and partners help each other. Finally we also want to be ready to integrate a chat solution later-on, which should allow immediate ticket creation if necessary and integrate into Salesforce.

Integrations to Salesforce and JIRA are mandatory as we do have those products already running in-house. 

I realize that Atlassian offers JIRA Service Desk + Confluence, which fulfills two of our four very high-level requirements. But we are missing the opportunity of having a forum, and I am not sure about Confluence add-ons as those are pushing up the licenses immensely (and are no native solutions for a customer/partner forum).

Furthermore a chat solution is not offered that plays well with JIRA Service Desk out of the box.

Reasons enough to look at other products as well. I realized that Zendesk offers support/service desk, knowledge base, chat, community/forum, and many other things. Also JIRA and Salesforce integration should work without problems.

What do you think about that? I try to see a point why we should use Atlassian products also externally. It seems that others offers more with less manual, complex, error-prone integrations.

[Janusz Gorycki]

Hi Markus,

Janusz from Spartez here.

I think we haves what you are looking for!

We have recently released the Chat for Service Desk (server) app. It provides a real-time chatting solution ("live chat") that helps your site visitors / app users connect with teams working through Jira Service Desk.

It is NOT an integration with a 3rd party chatting service - it is self-contained - you just install the app in Service Desk, place a bit of javascript on your web site (or just enable the chat on your customer portal) and you have full chat support.

It has a bunch of nifty features:

• Creates issues out of chat conversations on-the-fly
• Turns customer’s messages into issue comments - updating issue views in real time
• Turns your issue comments into messages within the chat
• Handles request queues updates
• Lets you see which customers are currently online
• Allows support personnel to toggle their availability
• Chat widget is replaced with email when all agents are offline
• Sends the customer chat digests through email
• Fully optimized for mobile web pages
• Chat look & feel is customisable

Interested? You may want to try it out - it’s just available on the Atlassian Marketplace.

An introduction video can also be viewed here.

Cheers,
Janusz Gorycki, spartez.com