JIRA Service Desk has two main interfaces, one for the customers raising requests, and one for agents providing solutions. In this recipe, we will look at how to customize the service desk portal, which is the front facing user interface used by your customers.
Perform the following steps to troubleshoot notification problems in JIRA:
- Browse to the service desk to customize.
- Click on the Project administration option on the lower-left corner of the screen.
- Select the Portal settings option from the panel on the left-hand side.
From here, you can configure a range of customizations on how the service desk portal will look like when a customer visits it. You can add logos, and announcement messages. With the announcement message, you can use a wiki markup, so you will be able to use styles such as bold and italic as well as create hyperlinks. For example, the following announcement message uses some of these markups:
Welcome to the newly launched Global Support Center!
If you have any issues or questions, please contact us at [email protected]. We are here to help!
- *your friendly support team*
And the final result of the message will look as follows:
After you have customized the look and feel of your service desk portal, you will need to customize the type of requests that customers can create. By planning out the request types properly, you can help your customers to better understand where to log their requests so that they can be routed to the relevant team members for faster resolution.
- Select the Request types option from the panel on the left-hand side.
- Add a new request type by entering the name of the request, its type, and the groups it belongs to. Requests of the same group will be rolled up in the portal. A request can belong to multiple groups.
When selecting and creating groups for your request, try to name them based on the common theme shared by all the request types that belong to it.
JIRA Service Desk leverages many of JIRA's built-in capabilities, and its request types are built on top of the issue type feature. A request type in a service desk is mapped to an issue type in JIRA. The main difference here is that the request type is what the customer sees, so it allows you to give it a more descriptive name to help customers better understand the purpose behind each request type. For example, an issue type called Bug can have a request type called Report an application defect mapped to it. While they will both mean the same thing to a support agent or engineer, the request type will be a lot friendlier in the eyes of a customer.
For this reason, when managing request types, you need to make sure the corresponding issue types exist for the service desk project before you can map to it. You can refer to the recipe Setting up different issue types for projects in Chapter 2, Customizing JIRA for Your Projects, for detailed information.
