How Your Customers Can Create a Jira Ticket from their Outlook Email

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People have become pretty dependent on the "Software as a Service" market, to the extent that Statistica predicts it will be worth around $195.21 billion by the end of 2023. It also means that more and more development teams are coming together and utilizing agile project management tools, such as Jira, to optimize their workflow and improve their team collaboration. While Jira itself is useful in the development cycle, however, other parts of the workflow and team members require different tools to get to work. This necessitates integrations with other apps that help get everything done faster. Today we will be focusing on the use of emails to create Jira tickets using a Jira Outlook Plugin: Microsoft Outlook for Jira.

The Importance of Customer Success for SaaS Companies 

Since the SaaS market is booming with new services coming out every day, it has become rather competitive. Companies need to be innovative and well-advertised to leave a mark in the industry. Sadly, this means that the chances of getting new customers can range from 5-20%. On the other hand, if you opt for customer retention by keeping customers happy and coming back, you have a much higher success rate of 60-70% to sell them more solutions or extended licenses.

What this basically means is that you need to keep your customers happy, something you can easily do by coming up with the right service desk.

How Microsoft Outlook for Jira and Jira Service Management Can Help

A very popular channels for customer support is email. So, if you set up the right integration, your agents will be able to create Jira tickets from their Outlook emails by submitting customer requests using Jira Service Management. All you need to do is integrate Microsoft Outlook for Jira with JSM to facilitate sharing email content and attachments from Outlook.

The good news is, agents can skip this step altogether and give customers access to do it themselves. With Microsoft Outlook for Jira's most exclusive feature, customers can be given access to a company's Jira support portal, and they will be able to create their own requests using Outlook. Companies will be able to control who is able to get that access and maintain control, while giving their high-profile and most important clients the ability to create customer requests on their own.

How Saas Company Customers Can Create a Jira Ticket from Outlook Emails

Let’s take a look at a hypothetical scenario of how a SaaS company can make use of this feature. Say the company has purchased a Jira Service Management license for 1,000 users, despite having over 10,000 employees overall. In this case, the licenses would be given to two departments in terms of necessity for work: the HR department and the IT department.

However, this ITSM solution is pretty important for all of the employees to help create support tickets whenever they’re facing IT or technical issues. Whether they’re undergoing technical issues, onboarding new employees, installing a new software, or asking about tools handed over by the company, the issues can encompass all sorts of things. 

This might pose a problem since technically only two departments have access to Jira Service Management, meaning the rest would need a workaround to be able to solve their issues. The most likely solution would be to contact the IT department directly, which might cause a problem with the workflow and figuring out who is in charge of solving this issue in the first place.

Thankfully, there’s a new solution available!

They can install Microsoft Outlook for Jira and access the company’s support portal from there. They won’t need to have a license, they will simply create their login credentials and raise a request with whatever problem they are facing at the time. While they won’t be able to access the app’s full features by creating and managing tickets, they can send out support requests going straight to the IT team without affecting their workflow.

Here is a step-by-step process of how a customer can access the Jira customer portal through Outlook using Microsoft Outlook for Jira.

• Step one: Download the app from the Atlassian Marketplace.
• Step two: Install the add-on to your Outlook.
• Step three: Connect it to your Outlook.

Conclusion

No one knows what the future holds with SaaS companies, but it is safe to say that the market is going at a high trajectory with billions of dollars in the making. With this projection, customer retention has become very vital as well as being able to provide the best possible service out there. Providing your customers with direct access to your Jira service desk will help them communicate their needs better. Better communication means that you will be more likely to solve whatever issue arises and come up with desired solutions that will help keep your customers coming back, as well as spreading the word about you and your services.