Who do you use for your front end support?

[Daniel Westgate]

Basically, Jira Service Desk lacks a lot of basic functionality from the customer portal being poor to the responses to reporters not including the thread of the email.

Some might say, well there's a plugin for that, but the reality is, these things should just work, and paying for each thing we need just isn't a viable business model.

We will continue to use Jira for the developer aspect, but for your front end receiving and replying to tickets, and customer portal, who are you using and does it integrate with JIRA?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Speaking for a lot of our clients, and notably, an increasing number, often moving off other helpdesk software... well, Jira Service Desk.

We don't see many looking at threading in emails, unless they're transitioning off software that did it.  When we do, it's often cited as one of the smaller annoyances things that they're moving away from, as they're finding the software over-blown, over-complex, puts too much in front othe customer and basically misses the point of keeping things as simple as possible for the customer.

[Jack Brickey]

agree with Nic here.

Actually, we have one project that migrated from Freshdesk where threading was supported and the team really wanted. The reason for this was that, while they were using Freshdesk, the reality was that the customers were only using email and they had not interest in another tool. They simply wanted to broadcast request to multiple recipients via Outlook and have someone deal with it. Moreover, they wanted all responses to have quoted threading so they could continually peruse back thru the convo. To satisfy the requirement I employed JEMH. However, recently we have found complications where customer replies end up having all of the thread 'above the line' which results in duplicates/triplicates/quadruplets.... happening in the JSD issue comments. I'm trying to reconcile this now and it is a real bugger.

[Daniel Westgate]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Thanks for the response, and I appreciate you taking the time to respond, but it really avoids my question. Our customers are complaining that they can't see the thread. Atlassian has no other solution than buy a plugin. But I only need the this for 17 agents but have to pay for over 59. It's just not realistic. And as Adaptavist sell plugins, I can see why you may have taken that view.

I have worked in IT a long time, and to say customers don't want to see the thread is not a true reflection and is a matter of opinion.

@Jack BrickeyOur customers only use email, we cannot allow them to use the portal as it gives them the ability to see other customers that we are working with (unless we buy a plugin) and again I appreciate the feedback, but your solution is to buy a plugin. Which both of you have really proven my point.

It might work for some customers this way, but the reality is if you want it to work buy a plugin.

I appreciate the time you have taken to respond, but neither of you has answered my question of:

"Who do you use for your front end receiving and replying to tickets, and customer portal, who are you using and does it integrate with JIRA?"

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think you might have missed the first part of the answer.

You asked "Who do you use for your front end receiving and replying to tickets, and customer portal, who are you using and does it integrate with JIRA?"

My answer was "Jira Service Desk."

We use it to gather and respond to requests, it provides a customer portal, it's JSD and it's part of the Jira systems we use to develop and support our products and services.  And that goes for a lot of our clients too.

I appreciate that you've got customers and possibly agents who want email threads, but most of our customers, and the customers of clients, just want their request addressed, not a long history in an update email.  Your experience is different, but I can't give you another answer - the people I support either use Jira Service Desk for their contact, or they simply don't use it at all, and have some integration with another service desk system (my point on those is that we're seeing more and more people moving off those and on to JSD - Cherwell, Remedy etc as legacy systems, and others moving from Service Now, Freshdesk and so-on - notable exception is I'm not seeing people come to JSD from Zoho)

[Andy Brook]

@Jack Brickey reach pls out to support@thepluginpeople.com, we have  a feature for JEMH underway that could help (effectively a scripted pre-processing task), would like your input on the feature!

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-  Hi Nic, long time :)

@Daniel Westgate ahm, well,  we use JSD to 'manage' our support, even if its cloud hosted, obv we see a lot of email, and obv we use the cloud version, JEMHC, to clean up.  JEMH for Server/DC has a lot more features and flexibility (eg scripting).  The topic you raise "not including the thread of the email." well, that can be done with JEMH if you want to comment a full email reply to an existing issue, just forward the mail, and you're done.   JEMH has a configurable subject prefix to match on (for English) Fw: / Fwd: prefixes, such content is then excluded from the usual 'clean up' that you would normally want to happen.  Happy to answer questions if email is your pain point, here or via support.

[Daniel Westgate]

@Andy Brookthank you for also proving my point of you have to use a plugin.

[Andy Brook]

Any time :)  Its unreasonable to expect Atlassian products to solve every case, that niche is what extensions are for, for specific single cases, sure, the value proposition may not be there, but if you look at what else you can leverage from apps (solving things you didn't know you needed), maybe it stacks up better.  If not, maybe the requirement wasn't that important after all...