Build an Awesome Jira Service Management in 5 Steps

The first point of contact for customers is often your service management, so it's really important that it helps to raise customer satisfaction, but it should certainly make your life easier too. If you're planning to build a service management (or help desk) using Jira Service Management or you just want to improve your existing JSM portal, we're here to help! In this blog, we'll share some of the knowledge we've gained from building a great variety of Jira Service Management Portals, for ourselves and for countless customers.

The good news is that the tips you will find below are all relatively easy to implement. And applying these best practices should really help you optimise your service desk to meet both your own needs, and those of your customers. 

How we have implemented Jira Service Management

One of the services our company offers is hosting of Atlassian products. In order to support our hosting customers efficiently, we've set up a support portal using Jira Service Management. Aside from the fact that we're Atlassian partners and should really 'eat our own dog food', there are several important reasons why we chose this type of customer contact point:

1. There is one central point of contact; 
2. Customers can choose specific tickets for specific requests;
3. Agents receive all the information they need right away, which decreases waste, time to response and time to resolution.

We could elaborate on this further, but in order to keep this blog short, we will assume you're already convinced about the usefulness of service management. If that's not the case (or if you need to convince someone else in your organisation), we recommend checking out this Atlassian blog article that serves up some interesting arguments as to why you should get a help desk.

So let’s just get you started on the configuration of your Jira Service Management by following these 5 easy steps.

Step 1: Create Specific Request Types

Make it easy for your users to specify what they need your help with. By adding specific request types, support agents will be able to tackle issues more efficiently and resolve them quicker. This is because specific request types means requests can be prioritised, validated and assigned quickly and efficiently. Aside from that (and we will elaborate on this in the next step) you can request information from customers that relate to a specific type of request.

We recommend avoiding request types that are too broad or too vague, or that simply state “incident” or “service request”. If you do want to add general types however, make sure to place them lower in the list.

Step 2: Get the Information You Need

Linking specific questions to each type of request will give support agents the information they need to help customers as well and as efficiently as possible.In the case of an incident for example, you might want to have the following information:

• A brief description of the incident
• The services that are affected
• Steps to reproduce
• The number of users that are impacted
• Additional relevant information, such as screenshots, logs, etc 
• How to contact the user

Step 3: Set up a Self-Service Portal

How about providing customers with the information they need to solve their issues themselves? Of course, not all customer requests can be solved using knowledge base articles, but for general, repetitive requests, you should really integrate Atlassian Confluence with your support portal to add knowledge base functionality.

In addition to this, the knowledge base can be expanded by adding restricted articles, only visible to support agents, for internal processes and documentation. This helps them share knowledge and ultimately, find information faster.

• Link to multiple Confluence spaces.
• Referring to external links in search results.
• Viewing permissions on certain content items.
• Showing open requests on the home portal.

To illustrate the possibilities an app like this offers, we can use our own portal as an example. At Avisi, we like to keep things a little informal and we like to entertain our customers a bit... so we regularly customise our support portal. We make it snow in winter, show a flying Santa around Christmas or have an Avisi rocket shoot through your screen. It's simple, but most customers like it.

Our portal powered by Refined Theme for Jira Service Management

Need help?

We hope that we provided you with some inspiration and some applicable tips that will help make your customer portal a success. If you need more Atlassian expertise for setting up a Jira Service Management, we are here to help!