How to notify customers upon updates to a feature request?

[Haganta Ginting]

I have a public tracker project through which I would like our customers to be able to stay updated on the features they have requested. Customers would be able to view these public tracker ticket, and I would like them to be notified whenever updates happen to this ticket. This is set up as a Jira Software project at the moment.

At the moment, I am not able to add our customers as watchers to these feature request tickets. The customers I have set up in our JSM project do not show up as users I can add onto these issues. So at the moment, they are not notified when updates happen to these feature request tickets. As a workaround, I am considering adding a custom user field through which I could enter a user's e-mail. Afterwards, I would set up an automation that would send out an e-mail to these users whenever an update happens to the feature request. However, it does not seem like I can add a customer to this user field.

I would like to know if there is a direct way for us to automate notifying our customers whenever the feature request tickets are updated. If there is no way, I would like to know if it is possible to add customers into a custom user field, or if there would be any other workaround to allow customers to be notified on updates to our feature requests.

[Ken McClean]

One of the challenges I've found with automations is that you can't simply tell it to "email such and such an email address". It will only give you the option to email a licensed user of the system.

Do you have ScriptRunner or some other way of extending the functionality of the system?

[Haganta Ginting]

To my knowledge the instance I am working with does not currently have ScriptRunner or similar apps installed. However, I have been able to configure automation to send emails to a custom user field. Would I be correct in assuming there is just no way to add customers as a user in this field? 

[Ken McClean]

Correct, customers aren't considered "users" because they're not licensed (usually).  So they don't take up license spots, but on the other hand you can't treat them like regular users of the system,

[Haganta Ginting]

That makes sense. We are trying to set-up something similar to the public bug tracker Atlassian themselves have, but it seems to not be something that is very easily set up. Thank you for your help!