JIRA was originally designed and intended as a tool for developers. It was also designed to be an issue-tracking tool to capture bugs and tasks as they build software. However, its flexibility and extensibility allowed users to use and adapt it into almost any other use cases. Recognizing this and JIRA's potential, a new product called JIRA Service Desk from Atlassian has been released, which was built on top of the JIRA platform, transforming it into a fully-fledged service desk solution.
By the end of the chapter, you will learn the following topics:
- Installing JIRA Service Desk
- Creating and branding a new service desk
- Defining and setting up a service-level agreement
- Creating custom queues for agents to work from
- Integrating with Confluence to set up a knowledge base
In each of our previous chapters, we were building JIRA as a support system, which is a part of our end of chapter exercise. While JIRA is more than capable of handling the requirements of a service desk, there are still a number of things to be desired.
For example, the user interface is often too complicated and confusing for business users to simply create a support ticket. Despite our best efforts, there are still way too many options on the screen, most of which are not useful in a Service Desk Environment. Another example is the lack of ability to set up any sort of service-level agreement to ensure a consistent quality of service.
This is where JIRA Service Desk comes in. It addresses all the out-of-the-box shortcomings of JIRA by providing a clean, intuitive, and user-friendly interface for both the end customers and support team. It also provides many features that you can expect from a service desk solution. As shown in the following screenshot, JIRA Service Desk lets you serve your customers in four easy steps:
Image source: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/SERVICEDESK/Getting+started+with+JIRA+Service+Desk