Customer & Organization Management in Jira Service Management: design a high-velocity agent-customer experience

In our current business environments, we are naturally tending towards tools that are fast and easy to use. User experience is essential, and we strive to make our tools clear and intuitive. Jira Service Management (JSM) has it all. Integrating closely across the Atlassian suite, it is one of the Atlassian stack tools dedicated to service management for all teams. Overall, JSM enables your IT, Development, and Sales teams to provide first-rate Service Management on a broad scale. Atlassian’s investment in JSM is clearly paying off as it has recently been recognized by Gartner as a “Leader” in ITSM.

However, something we have noticed that is consistently overlooked by those assessing the capabilities of JSM is the lack of attention it receives for both its adaptability (through configuration) and extensibility (through the huge 3rd party app space). These capabilities mean users can get so much more out of JSM. Keep reading to find out how to put JSM into an even higher gear.

Jira Service Management is a perfect tool to accelerate workflow between development, IT, and business teams. Its SLA (Service Level Agreement) functionality fosters confidence between customers and the company and allows the design of a customer Portal for reporting tickets. It is a two-way tool where we must take care of the agent and customer experience.

However, Jira Service Management is not a complete ITSM solution. It requires a different set of apps and configurations to create a truly high-velocity agent-customer experience. How to make the most of the potential from gathered data, and how to shorten the agent’s path to the customer so that he gets everything he needs to resolve the ticket quickly? And how to make it more customer-centered, useful, and intuitive?

In this article, Blended Perspectives and Appsvio will demonstrate how by leveraging our solutions, JSM customers can ensure they are maximizing their ITSM investment.

Customer & Organization Management as a key to unlocking high-speed teams in a large-scale Jira Service Management

What is Customer and Organization Management?

A Customer and Organization Management definition may be tricky. Typically, it enables you to enter information for each of your contacts. Contact details like a name, number, email address, or business can be included in this. Sounds like a Customer Relationships Management? Not really. Customer and Organization Management can be a part of CRM, but remember that we’re talking about Atlassian software, and it’s not dedicated to CRM. Jira can be a tool for customer relationship management, but even extras addon won’t entirely replace tools created especially for it.

Let’s see what the differences are between these two concepts.

Figure 1: Customer and Organization Management vs. Customer Relationships Management

Customer and Organization Management is crucial when referred to ESM (Enterprise Service Management), and unfortunately almost unavailable natively in JSM.

Why is Customer and Organization Management so important in large-scale Jira Service Management?

Customer and Organization Management is key to fastening ticket resolution from agents’ point of view and minimizing their extra work. Especially when it comes to large-scale Jira Service Management. Knowledge is always powerful, so when implementing Customer and Organization Management, we should recognize customers or organizations at our fingertips. Imagine that you have information about which organization or project a specific customer is assigned to immediately. Quick access to data is a time saver.

Also, when we speak about large-scale Jira Service Management, bulk operations are a game-changer. Would you like to change the office address for 5k customers manually? Well, we don’t think so! With Customer and Organization Management, you should easily add customers or their attributes in bulk and save yourself extra and spare work.

In large instances, Jira Service Management agents often deal with more advanced processes. It’s creating and closing tickets and broader operations with lots of steps, approvals, and more people engaged. Therefore, it’s essential to make it possible for customer data to be a part of a workflow.

Figure 2: Benefits of using Customer and Organization Management in JSM

How does Jira Service Management support Customer and Organization Management?

As we’ve mentioned, Jira Service Management covers two perspectives: customers’ and agents’. Let’s talk about the customer’s experience first. Jira Service Management gives only one place where customer data is stored – the customer section. The customer fulfills fields like name, time zone, email, and language. There is no option in the native view to add other fields which can be useful, like contact preferences. There are no places to provide such basic information to agents, such as contact consent, reading the privacy policy, etc. The agents themselves can ask for it directly in the ticket comment but repeat the same question many times if someone submits a ticket with us several times. What a waste of time.

In the case of the agent’s experience, there are also a few limited views. Customers view is a site that is a list of clients under the project with data such as the amount of opened and closed tickets.

Figure 3: Default view in JSM – customers 

The same attributes are displayed in the Organizations view. Two features worth mentioning are in the global configuration: can agents manage an organization, and should new requests automatically be shared with a customer organization.

Figure 4: What are the main Jira Service Management pain points?

That data and permissions aren’t enough to design a high-velocity agent-customer experience and say goodbye to agents’ being stuck in their work due to a lack of information. So let’s get more of it.

How to fill the gap between Customer & Organization Management in Jira Service Management?

As we already mentioned, Jira Service Management is not a complete ITSM tool. Still, with the right extensions, it can become the most complete, flexible, and powerful ITSM tool out there and can significantly improve agents’ work and communication with customers. So how to boost experience from both points of view?

At Blended Perspectives, when working with clients to improve their JSM experience, we leverage SYNTHESIS™ as a working and adaptable platform upon which we build successful, scalable solutions. With the Atlassian suite (including JSM) and 3rd party Atlassian Marketplace apps (as we’ll dive into) as the groundwork, our SYNTHESIS™ Solutions enable faster implementations with a much greater ROI (since you’re leveraging tools you already use as well as cost-effective plugins).

One of our most popular SYNTHESIS™ Solutions is our ITSM (Integrated Service Management) Solution.

Figure 5: The Benefits of Leveraging the SYNTHESIS™ ITSM Solution

Our SYNTHESIS™ Integrated Service Management Solution is a highly sophisticated prototype that is built and ready to be implemented within any organization looking to implement ITSM beyond JSM. We leverage a number of Atlassian Marketplace 3rd party apps, but in order to solve the problem of Customer & Organization Management we utilize Customer and Organization Management for Jira Service Management by Appsvio.

Customer and Organization Management is just one part of our Integrated Service Management Solution, as you can see in Figure 6, and it is worth noting that for customers just looking to solve the problem of Customer & Change Management in JSM, Appsvio’s app is an excellent stand-alone product.

Figure 6: SYNTHESIS™ Integrated Service Management Solution

Along with 3rd party apps like Customer and Organization Management to extend the base Atlassian offering, the SYNTHESIS™ Integrated Service Management Solution utilizes industry best practices (ITIL), a user/role based experience (not product based), integrates across the organization, while also leveraging JSM at the project level and beyond with enterprise considerations.

Get in touch with us if you’re interested in leveling up your JSM/ITSM experience!

Next, we’ll dive into how Appsvio’s Customer and Organization Management for Jira Service Management helps from both the Agent and Customer perspectives.

Agents’ perspective

Customer and Organization Management is an app to gather and use additional information about customers or employees – about Portal users. It displays by default only basic information from the customer profile without any form setting (name, e-mail, language, time zone). The Jira administrator must set up a form and specify the attributes they want to collect to get more data. These fields are available for editing from the issue view (by the service agent) or in the profile once the form has been saved (by the customer). The agent’s job will undoubtedly be more manageable by having all the information at their fingertips. They can ask customers about their preferences, contact data, job title, or department. Then they can preview the answers and other customer data to speed up the ticket service. The agents gain one source of truth and don’t have to deal with repetitive questions when every ticket appears.

Figure 7: How to set up additional information 

Sometimes agents also want to share some experience and information. Customer and Organization Management can put comments not visible to customers to ensure the team gets the details about the organization or reporter, or f.e to score them. Knowing if someone has a friendly approach or maybe not is also valuable information.

Figure 8: Adding the internal note 

The customers’ and organizations’ view is also upgraded. First, all projects are in one place, where agents can roll customers under the concrete project. Secondly, there are additional properties, so agents have needed information right away in one neat and tidy view.

Figure 9: Customers and Organizations’ view in Customer and Organization Management

From this view, there is also access to all the collected information. When you click on show information, a dialog will be displayed.

Figure 10: Customers and Organizations’ view in Customer and Organization Management

Customers’ perspective

When it comes to customers using the Portal, Customer and Organization Management allows them to easily change their data and fill in all the necessary information immediately.

Figure 11: Customer Portal in Customer and Organization Management

There is no need to ask your customers many times the same questions – it can be very frustrating and time-consuming. The customer does the job once and then just waits for the resolution. The app boosts the customer-agent relationship and communication and eliminates spare information changes. Concreteness is at a premium.

Conclusion

And there we have it–like Blended Perspectives has done with our ITSM SYNTHESIS™ Solution, you too can boost your JSM experience with Customer and Organization Management for Jira Service Management by Appsvio.

Customer and Organization Management allows agents to save time and boost ticket resolutions due to better communication with customers and the team. Agents don’t need to waste their time on repetitive questions, which delay the work and could be annoying for customers. Thanks to apps like Customer and Organization Management, it is possible to take agents’ work up a notch and relieve agents of unnecessary work.

You can try Customer and Organization Management by Appsvio today.

You can also get in touch with Blended Perspectives if you’re interested in learning more about our ITSM SYNTHESIS™ Solution.