These days we expect customer service to be quick, efficient, and effective. Business stakeholders want their work prioritized quickly, all while delivering a first-class service.

We know that’s a lot to ask in a service desk portal. Through Jira Service Desk in the Atlassian suite, Content Bloom has implemented several SD portals that enable IT professionals, content editors, business stakeholders, and product owners the visibility, quality, and measurement they are asking for.

In this article, we will uncover and touch on some of our favorite strategies and tactics, so you can immediately improve your Jira Service Desk.

Let’s break it down.

1. Granularity in Requests

The first, and most important, consideration when setting up a customer portal is the form structure that customers are allowed to request and work within. The biggest mistake that customers make at this stage of the game is creating forms that are very broad and general, ones which consist of a description box, attachment box, and a title.

Why is this an issue?

• It allows customers to copy and paste whatever they want into the box
• It allows customers to be vague; requiring back and forth with service desk agents
• It allows multiple requests to be submitted, within one request

The solution is simple. Granularity in requests. The more granular, the better [think – separate field per piece of information required]. Not only will this allow you to make fields mandatory, leaving little room for customers to side-step your processes, but it will also give the service desk agents everything they need to complete the work – the first time around.

2. Automation

Businesses around the world are buzzing with the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in 2020. We are surrounded by automation nearly everywhere we go.  From fast-food chains to grocery stores, and online market places.

Service Desk is the perfect tool for automating excessive amounts of manual work, allowing all kinds of customizations in automation.

In our experience, automation can be utilized for many functions. A few notables include:

• Auto-close or reopen tickets based on comments
• Assign components and labels to tickets based on custom field submits
• Auto-comment/assign requests based on how the form was filled out
• Communication with customers on SLAs

The possibilities are endless…

Not only does automation reduce the load on the service desk team when completing manual, repetitive work, but it can also be used to set expectations with customers and reduce the overall frustration of waiting in queue for work to be completed, making it a win-win scenario.

Here is a sample automation rule:

3. One-Stop Shop

Simplify the process for customers.

Combine all portals into a one-stop universal portal. Having worked with clients who had several portals, I’ve experienced their frustrations. Service desk portals need to be as frictionless as possible to gain customer buy-in. Explaining to customers that they submitted the work in the wrong location after they’ve been waiting for the work to be completed, is the fastest way to lose confidence in the process.

Tip: Use automation to separate requests based on custom fields that are filled out in the form. [i.e. If the request is submitted as content, create an automation rule to assign the “Content” component to that ticket. If a Kanban board is set up to include all “Content” requests, this will automatically queue the item for that team.]

4. Measurement

One underutilized feature of Jira Service Desk is the ability to export to CSV.  

We like data and trends. It helps us identify shortcomings, improvement areas, bottlenecks, and celebrate wins when our teams make strides. By exporting to CSV, formatting the raw data, and importing into Microsoft BI, we can perform data analysis on all fields in SD.

We’ve created custom reporting on:

• Cycle time
• Split of requests
• Service agent productivity
• Customer data
• Satisfaction responses

Wrapping up

Service desk isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

Customers, clients, stakeholders, and agents are different for every project. If you take away anything from this article, it should be that the goal is to reduce load on service desk agents while minimizing friction for customers.

By having granular request types, automating manual tasks, using one portal for all requests, and including measurement reporting into your process – you will achieve just that.