🛟 AMA – Using Jira Service Management for Customer Support [CLOSED]

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

UPDATE (6/29/2023): 

Starting off with a big, big thank you to all the community members who joined the live AMA session today about customer service management. Gabriel, Cathi and I had a great time connecting with you and answering your questions.

For those of you who weren't able to join us live:

• The recording of the session is available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf).
• A customer service management product guide is available here.
• And more on the recent launch for rich customer context here.

Cheers!

Alex

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👋 Hello Atlassian Community!

Alex here from the Jira Service Management product marketing team. I’d like to invite you all to ask us anything about using Jira Service Management for external-facing support. We’ll be answering all your questions LIVE at 1pm PST / 4pm EST on June 29th. Please feel free to ask away about:

• Our vision and roadmap for customer service on the Atlassian platform.

• How to set up Jira Service Management for customer service.

• Recently launched customer service management features.

• And anything else you can come up with!

We’re seeing companies of all shapes and sizes leaning on their familiarity with Atlassian and relying more and more on Jira Service Management to support customers and partners, not just internal teams. In fact, 1 out of every 4 Jira Service Management customers are already using it to provide external customer support 🚀

We’ve got the following experts lined up to answer your questions:

• Gabriel Raubenheimer, Product Manager, Jira Service Management for Customer Service

• Cathi Davey, Principal Solutions Consultant, Atlassian

• And yours truly, Alex Zhitnitsky, Product Marketing Senior Team Lead

Here’s how it works:

• Register for the event here.

• Submit your questions below by leaving an "Answer" by June 29th.

• Upvote other interesting questions.

• Join us at 1 pm PST / 4pm EST on June 29th, 2023 via your registration link to join the conversation and hear your questions answered live.

[Dennis]

Hi @Alex Zhitnitsky 

• How does Atlassian envision working on a project with multiple teams?
  

  • Example: one IT project with multiple teams (one first level support, multiple second level support, etc.)

  • Currently there is no good way to assign tickets to another team/queue and notify this team

  • Workaround: Create a custom field, groups and automation rules. However, this has large configuration and maintenance overhead and native notifications (mail templates) cannot be used

• Can improvements in language support be expected?
  • Biggest disadvantage, is that Forms cannot be translated. This makes them almost unusable for international companies.
  • Custom Field options cannot be translated

  • Transitions cannot be translated (not even for the customer view)

  • Titles of external resources can not be translated

• Why is there no group picker field in forms?

[Sandra Axelsdottir]

Good questions and I can relate to all of them.

[Dennis]

A few more additions

• Can improvements in language support be expected?
  • Knowledgebase articles cannot be translated
• Will the attachment field be available in Forms?
  • If you currently want a form and a attachment field in one request type, you have to add the attachment as a normal field, so it is always above the form.
  • Alternatively it would be even better if you could move the form, this would give even more possibilities

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Thanks @Dennis! Our panelists reviewed your questions and we'll try to address most of them during the AMA. A recording will be shared here after the event.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi Dennis, the recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf).

[Adam Wu]

Will this session be recorded and shared somewhere as the time is not that friendly for APAC users?

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

👋 Hi @Adam Wu welcome to the Atlassian Community! This session will be recorded and shared back here, but I also recommend RSVP'ing to the event to stay in the loop. In the meantime, if you'd like to learn more about this use case I also recommend checking out this recording from Team and the recently launched customer service product guide.

It's also worth noting that questions will be answered async in this post, so even if you're not able to attend the live event please feel free to post your questions here and we'll address it live and/or in a comment along with everyone else's questions.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

@Adam Wu as promised, the recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf).

[David Meredith]

I'm writing some questions here to give an opportunity to look into some of these topics and prepare some answers.... I think if I were to ask them live there wouldn't be an immediate answer and someone would have to respond at a later date anyway.

• What is the strategy around how best to collect information from users?
  • The Jira Forms (ProForma) have made gathering the right information dynamically really easy. The API will mean that the same forms can be served in virtual agents / chatbots etc. Will Request Types be phased out / merged? Just become a container for multiple forms? 
• What is the strategy around team management / assignment?
  • There is a massive functionality gap between teams and groups
  • https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-80976
  • Team assignment is handled differently in different bits of Jira which is very confusing for users.
• Customer profile data
  • Will it ever be available for use in JSM?
  • Why not just store it in Assets?
  • The info that we get from Atlassian Access like, line manager, region, department etc is useful but functionally useless.
  • Want to report on volume of tickets per department? Despite the data being attached to the user record, you can't do it.
  • The ability to send approvals to a known line manager would speed up loads of service requests.
  • Currently to achieve the same thing customers manually create these relationships in Assets objects.
• Comments editor
  • Why is it only half rolled out in the new issue view?
  • Why isn't it used in transitions and everywhere else you can comment?
  • People want to use this for canned responses
• What do Atlassian consider core ITSM functionality?
  • I think many customers believe there is missing expected functionality that must currently be filled with extra paid marketplace addons.
  • For example:
    • MERGE
    • Searching a queue
    • Team Assignment
    • Email logs
    • Raise on behalf of (for customers)
    • Restrict requests for different customers / groups / orgs
    • Different resolutions per issue type / project
    • Custom fields for email notifications
• When will Mail handling improve?
  • Still prevelant, but image / table / signiture handling is still poor
  • Customers need to communicate with third parties and ideally the communication should be recorded in the ticket
  • Atlassian encourage Legal and HR SDs but from the ticket they can't for example send a communication to ONLY THE RECRUITER without also including the reporter and request participants.
• Atlassian Intelligence
  • When is this likely to reach virtual agents?
  • Apart from information gathering and serving can there be more examples of skills / capabilities for orchistration of tasks / activities

I might think of some more stuff for the live AMA but that's all I can think of right now....

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Thanks @David Meredith! Our panelists reviewed your questions and we'll try to address most of them during the AMA. A recording will be shared here after the event.

[David Meredith]

Great, looking forward to the event later.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Thanks for joining us today David! The recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf).

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Alex Zhitnitsky,

I was pleasantly surprised by the announcement at Team '23. I am very much looking forward to hearing how management of external customers will be enabled (adding customers, managing their data, link to their company and support tiers, how this integrates with the existing Organisations to share requests). 

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

That's awesome @Walter Buggenhout! Thanks for sharing. We'll make sure to address all your points in the AMA 🙌

[Johannes Wiedmann]

Hi @Alex Zhitnitsky 

Here's an additional question for which it would be great to get some answers:

We want to use the integration of Jira Service Management with Confluence to provide an integrated Knowledge Base to our external customers.

We are already using Confluence Premium as an internal knowledge base. Due to security and privacy concerns, it doesn't seem the right approach to have spaces on that site that are publicly and anonymously available, as there is a higher chance that internal information could leak externally.

Therefore, we've created a separate Confluence Premium site in our organization and connected it to the JSM site via App Links. However, JSM doesn't appear to support a Confluence knowledge base located on a different site (i. e. with a different domain).

There are multiple issues on this (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-5782, https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-8335), but no solution yet.

As you are now also targeting customer service teams with external customers, are there any plans to change this, or are there other suitable solutions to work around this limitation?

Best,

Johannes

[Johannes Wiedmann]

Hi @Alex Zhitnitsky 

Here are a few questions we have:

New "Profiles" feature:

• Will the new profiles feature where we can manage details on an organization or customer be more deeply integrated into the issue itself? Currently, agents would have to leave the issue view and open up the organization view separately to find that information.
• Concerning the question above: Will non-agents (i. e. internal collaborators) also be able to view the organization/customer profile details when they view the issue?
• Will there be an API to update details on an organization/customer? Our single source of truth is our CRM (Microsoft Dynamics). We already integrated that with the API provided by the Assets feature. Is something similar planned for organization/customer details?

Managing customer service with dedicated projects/portals for specific external customers:
We use JSM to provide support to various user groups:

1. Internal IT Support with a dedicated JSM project that is only open to internal users
2. External key-user support, where support is only provided to specific named users of our customers. We add them manually to a dedicated project with their email address.
3. External end-user support for a few certain external customers, where support is provided to all users of those customers (could be hundreds or even thousands of users). We don't know all those users in advance; only their email domains are known. Of course, we want to ensure the end-users of one customer have only access to "their" portal and not the portal for another customer.
   
   For this third case, we haven't found an appropriate solution in JSM yet:
   • We need a dedicated portal/project for each customer that gets end-user support
   • Self-signup needs to be enabled due to the high number of users; it has to be restricted by domain.
   • Domain restriction is currently only available globally but not on the project level.
   • This is a potential data privacy issue, as any customer could access those projects, not only the organization's customers to which the project is dedicated.

Do you have any plans for giving more granular control to project/portal access for external customers?

Are there any best practices to solve our requirements?

Customer-facing chatbots:

• Are there any plans to provide customer-facing chatbots (similar to Intercom and the like)?
• Atlassian Intelligence sounds promising but seems to be targeted only to internal users.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Thanks @Johannes Wiedmann! Our panelists reviewed your questions and we'll try to address most of them during the AMA. A recording will be shared here after the event.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi Johannes, the recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf), we called out some of your questions as part of it.

[Florian Schmidt]

Hello! As the AMA is about customer service i would like to ask a kind of similar question like david:

What is an ellegant way to handle 2 different parties / contributor within one ticket? 

Is there something planned to target comments to different people or groups of people?

Internal and external is just not enough to adress two different external parties that are not allowed to read each others comments.

JSM is mostly tied to a 1:1 communication but a customer service is maybe more than that

Thank you!

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Thanks @Florian Schmidt! Our panelists reviewed your question and will answer it during the AMA. A recording will also be shared here after the event.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi Florian, the recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf), we called out some of your questions as part of it.

[Dave Liao]

Can you recap the open JSM-related EAPs for the Community?

They occur frequently, I know - it would be good to have a reminder of what EAP's are available at a moment in time. Can include any Betas, like Virtual Agent. 🙌

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hey @Dave Liao! Good question, I'll address this in the live AMA in a bit and post more links here after the event.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hey Dave, the recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf). We called out your question as part of it so thanks for raising it here. The TL;DR is that there are a few ways to stay on top of this:

1. The first is the Atlassian Community. In many instances, we’ll also publish a community article when we’re recruiting EAP participants. Searching for "Early Access" in the Jira Service Management community is one way to do it.
2. And the second way is this EAP portal right here where you can request access to more programs or get support for the EAPs you're already participating in.

Worth noting that this is not a complete list, but it covers most EAPs we have going on right now I believe. For some of them, we work with more targeted lists of customers before releasing them to everyone, but you’ll hear about the more general ones in the community most likely. Hope this is helpful! 

[Dave Liao]

🙌 I had no idea about the EAP portal! Thanks for the tip!

[David Meredith]

I stumbled upon it when I was invited to my first EAP and found a load more that looked interesting.

There are a lot of features that are being trialled with customers that don't show up here though, like the AI Beta seems to be run somewhere else right now.

[Matthew Challenger]

There seems to be quite a bit of debate over the Cloud Custom Domain enhancement, which was recently announced, but not in a way that many voters seemed to have envisioned it. 

Any chance you can speak to some of the challenges and address some of the great points users like @JBellero have made?

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi @Matthew Challenger! We can generally address it but in the scope of this AMA, we likely won't have new information to share beyond the discussion on the feature request and the Enterprise community article.

[Walter Buggenhout]

I'm also wondering what is generally available or on the roadmap to allow customers to signup and/or identify themselves through digital ID and the level of integration with the mobile app. That may be 2 questions wrapped in 1, but I see quite a few actual use cases where the external customers are really field users accessing through mobile devices from the funniest places.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout, great questions! Just to make sure, please let me know if I got it right, sounds like you're asking about:

1. Signup methods for external customers / portal-only customers.

2. And situations where there are multiple customer records for the same person, which may or may not be a licensed agent.

[Walter Buggenhout]

I did not refer to multiple records for the same person really @Alex Zhitnitsky, but that is a very valid point of interest as well.

I was just thinking about the real life scenario where customers are in the field, trying to access your customer service portal. Not rarely, this happens when they have a real and - for them - urgent problem and they need to identify themselves for the very first time. In the heat of the moment, they need to identify themselves before they can engage around the problem they want to report (in many cases, just being able to call or chat is a lot more effective, but that is not the scenario here of course).

People nowadays have lots of ways to use their digital identity to connect to SaaS services. e.g in Belgium (and maybe beyond, I don't know) we have a service called itsme that allows you to securely authenticate with minimal effort from a laptop, mobile phone or other device). My question is essentially about such type of authentication methods that reduce friction around connecting to the portal. 

[Walter Buggenhout]

Silly as it may seem, we already have several customers using JSM for customer service but heavily promote the email channel (despite of all the downsides it brings) just because their customers need to otherwise go through the steps to create an account on the portal to unlock the full potential there. For which - if they are not frequent users - they obviously then forget their password for, which then becomes a new area of frustration when they have another problem in the future.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Thanks @Walter Buggenhout! Our panelists reviewed your question and will talk about authentication options for external customers during the AMA. A recording will also be shared here after the event.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi Walter, the recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf) in case you're interested.

[Brant Schroeder]

@Alex Zhitnitsky is this for both cloud and data center?

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi @Brant Schroeder great question! We can address this in more detail during the live AMA. For now, the short answer is that both Cloud and Data Center customers can use Jira Service Management for external-facing customer service, although the recently launched features are focused on Cloud.

[Brant Schroeder]

@Alex Zhitnitsky That is why I was asking.  I am interested in when or if any of the new features will be available in data center.  Atlassian continues to release new features for cloud an I understand that is the focus but their are features that would be great to have in DC and I was wondering if any of those would ever make it to DC or if DC will continue to have minimal changes and enhancements?

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

@Brent Schroeter that's good feedback! Generally speaking, enhancements for Data Center are constantly being rolled out, many of which also apply to customer service, like the experience improvements listed here alongside other roadmap items. Specifically for rich customer context, these features are Cloud only right now but if there's more appetite for this on Data Center I would be happy to pass the feedback along.

If you're also interested in learning more about the customer service use case for Data Center, recently at Team we featured Lufthansa's story around how they use Jira Service Management Data Center for external support when working with other airlines, so this is also another good resource to use as a reference.

[Dave Liao]

@Alex Zhitnitsky - There is definitely an appetite for Data Center-specific enhancements.

Many of my admin associates manage JSM DC instances - their agents would certainly benefit from any of the (currently) Cloud features if they were delivered for DC. 🙏

[Erki Tammik]

@Alex Zhitnitsky 
There are many questions in this thread that I planned to ask.
I'm getting a "Wrong passcode" error when trying to start watching a Zoom recording.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi @Erki Tammik, I just double-checked the link and passcode and it seems to be working. Can you please try again? Notice that it doesn't include the parenthesis, only: 

https://atlassian.zoom.us/rec/share/9ZSJCgnl1QhukL8HDG2a1jeNOXFWAbUh99jskXMlXy0xx3aAIpcImCnZS7vj6kpZ.bYIHD0PAAhfM2Yo3?startTime=1688067787000

&

N2z3=^Zf

[Lukasz]

Leaving this here hoping I can read the answer after the AMA, as it will be in the middle of the night for me. This will be a little philosophical, hope I manage to explain my question clearly :)

In my mind customer service is always back-and-forth. Customer asks (for) something, agent replies, customers accepts or clarifies the request, agent replies again... and so on. Now, JSM has two broad default status categories (not counting 'done' here): grey 'to-do' and blue 'in-progress'. My approach so far has been to interpret the 'to-do' status category as something my agents need to do, and 'in-progeress' as something that's happening externally, so I always tell them: "If you see a grey ticket in your queue, you have to open it and do something. If it is blue, it means it is waiting for the customer to do something, so you can ignore it until it goes grey". To make this work, I usually add some automations such as "if ticket is in such-and-such to-do status, and comment is added by the issue requester, transition the ticket to the next in-progress status" to make sure the action is moved to the agent side.

The problem is this approach feels a bit clunky and not quite how JSM was meant to be used - otherwise, surely there'd be some one-click method to always make sure it is clear who the action is on at any given moment, without needing a ton of automations.

Am I doing this wrong? Is it easier to instead have the bulk of ticket processing happen in the 'in-progress' status and have the agents rely on notifications to know when the action is on them?

Thanks for taking the time for this long and not very technical question.

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Lukasz,

The blue and grey colors you refer to are the status categories in Jira. Maybe also on a somewhat higher level, you could reduce every imaginable piece of work as a process that can be reduced to 3 generic steps:

• to do (grey): means it has been added to your list of work that needs to be done, but other than that, no work has been done yet.
•  in progress (blue): work has actually started, but has not completed yet. This is the stage that is usually split up into multiple, smaller steps (or statuses in a workflow)
• done (green): no more work needs to be done.

When you split up the in progress part, you usually end up with multiple statuses there to represented what is really happening. In a service ticket, representing the back and forth you described, you would most commonly statuses like support investigating and waiting for customer. Both statuses would be blue, as the process to resolve the ticket is underway. It is the status itself that determines who is responsible for the ticket. That alone should be clear enough in itself.

When the support team needs input from the customer, all they need to do is change the ticket status to waiting for customer and - while doing so - add a comment to the ticket to specify what is needed. Automation only comes in to update the ticket status when the customer replies with a comment, so all the support team needs to do is monitor the ticket's status.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Great answer, thanks @Walter Buggenhout! 🎯

[Lukasz]

@Walter Buggenhout 

Many thanks for the super helpful answer. That helps a lot. I needed a little while to digest this.

So is the general best practice to only have the first status in the workflow grey (to do)?

And maybe just to dig a bit deeper - if we have a status 'waiting for the customer' that the agents can set any ticket to, how does the automation later know which status to transition it to after customer's response? For example, take this default workflow from one of Atlassian's project templates:

If the ticket is in 'waiting for customer' and the customer replies, how does the automation know if it should transition it to 'waiting for support' or 'escalated'? I think I would want the ticket to go to the same status that it was before it was set to 'waiting for customer' if that makes sense?

Thanks again for your time, Walter, much appreciated!

[Colin Ostrom]

Is there any way to set comments in screens to default to an internal comment and not as respond to a customer? Or is there anyway to have transition screens have just respond to customer comments or just internal comments? We have very specific instances where we want to force comments to a customer and force comments internally. Also if an agent makes a mistake this can cause automations that post comment info to a customer to be sent before the edits were rectified. I understand that non-JSM users only have the ability to respond internally but having options or controls available to our JSM agents would be helpful. Thank you.

[Josh Firkser]

How to set up multiple clients, that should not see each other's customer portals? We would also prefer to not add each individual customer manually.

[Patrick van der Rijst]

Hi,

I wonder how you deal with 3rd line support, when that's a different vendor. I have a lot of customers that lean towards SNOW because their suppliers use it as well and believe the two would integrate really well.

[Patrick van der Rijst]

For customer facing support;

- I'm hoping to see permissions per request type. 

- Better reporting per organization, this field is still not supported in any chart

[Josh Cooper]

Are there any plans to introduce a native merge function for tickets in Cloud?

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi @Josh Cooper, thanks for submitting your question! The recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf) and we addressed this question in it. The short answer is that while we don't have a native option to merge tickets, it is possible to achieve this result using automation.

[Josh Cooper]

There are several open tickets regarding how Cloud parses signatures and them being included within the comments. Any progress on resolving this?

[Josh Cooper]

Are there any plans to impletion Azure Sign On for agents & customers in Cloud?

[Abdulla Khaitov]

hi, @Alex Zhitnitsky 

How I can get back adobe xd links to child issues after moving epic to another project?

for example 

I moved 1 epic with 70 child issues from project 1 to project 2 
but issues moved empty without their xd links ? So how I can get xd links back to them?

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

Hi @Alex Zhitnitsky, is there a plan to make these fields accessible from the issue view? It would be great to see them when hovering over the reporter for example.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi @Manon Soubies-Camy! Great question, if you're referring to rich customer context, the short answer is yes, but we'll address this more in-depth during the live AMA and share a sneak peek into what it would look like. A recording would be shared here too after the event.

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

Awesome! Looking forward to the recording :)

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi Manon, thanks again for submitting your question! The recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf). Here's a screenshot of how we envision these fields showing up on the issue view:

[Matt Budnyj]

Will it be possible to populate Customer/Org profiles and fields via API? Sometimes the source of truth for this data is an external system e.g. Salesforce. 

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi @Matt Budnyj! This is a great question as many other Jira Service Management customers share this need too. We'll make sure to address this and additional future plans during the AMA. A recording will also be shared here after the live event.

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi Matt, thanks again for submitting your question! The recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf). The short answer is YES, it's on the roadmap. Additional details and roadmap items are available in the recording.

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi there! What's the most requested feature, and is there a plan to roll it out soon? Thank you!

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Great question @Carlos Garcia Navarro! We'll make sure to address this live and also post an answer here after the live AMA.

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Cool, thanks!:-)

[Alex Zhitnitsky]

Hi Carlos, thanks again for submitting your question! The recording of the session is now available on Zoom (passcode: N2z3=^Zf). The answer to your question is... APIs and generally ways to import customer context from other tools into Jira Service Management. And yes, it's on our roadmap. As a first step, we're planning to launch CSV imports for rich customer context, and later on, the plan is to release an API for it.