Atlassian this week released an upgraded version of its JIRA Service Desk to help companies group their customers so they can view and share each others' requests. The latest version also allows for greater internal and external collaboration.
JIRA Service Desk users can also integrate their service desk with Confluence, Atlassian's team collaboration product, to build a support knowledgebase so that end users can self-serve answers to common problems via the service desk portal. With a new agent knowledge view, knowledge articles, such as how-to-guides or troubleshooting steps, can be intelligently recommended to the agent by service desk based on content in the ticket and presented to the agent within the agent console. The article can be viewed by the agent in context of solving the ticket. If there is no existing knowledge article for the request at hand, agents can create one and share it with the customer at the click of a button.
With the new capabilities, users can do the following
- Filter queues by the organization that submitted them and assign team members who are familiar with that organization's needs. Teams outside of the immediate service team can also monitor the queues and know what the most urgent issues are.
- Customize service level agreements (SLAs) by organization.
- Pull reports by organization.
- Personalize and customize emails sent to customers.
- Add design elements to email templates to reflect company design guidelines.
- Set up schedules and rules to control when and how emails are sent.
Together, all of the new capabilities "will help all technical teams, but especially customer support teams providing external support," says Sid Suri, vice president of growth at Atlassian.
According to Suri, Atlassian launched JIRA Service Desk in 2013 specifically for technical support teams. The product's use has expanded beyond that.
"Over the last three years, we've seen JIRA Service Desk adopted by IT, customer support, and even business teams such as marketing and HR," he says.
In addition, many JIRA Service Desk users provide support to both their employees and their customers through the portal.
"Employees want multichannel, mobile-forward, self-service solutions, and it turns out that customers want that, too," Suri adds. "Gone are the days of siloed support experiences for IT teams and customer service teams.
"With this convergence in mind, we've put a significant investment in building features that we think would be beneficial for all teams," he continues. "JIRA Service Desk can help not only internal IT but also external support teams, especially those who want to use customer feedback to guide product development."