Before we start using JIRA Service Desk, it is important to understand that we familiarize ourselves with the key terminology, as follows:
- Agents: These are members of your service support team that will be working on customer requests. They are your normal JIRA users that can perform actions such as editing, assigning, and closing requests.
- Customers: These are the end users that will be raising support requests in your service desk. These can be customers of your product, or colleagues from other departments needing IT support.
- Customer portal: This is the main landing page for your customers. It is a simple, clean, and easy-to-use front interface for your service desk, without all the extra noise from the standard JIRA interface. The following screenshot shows the customer portal from Atlassian's support portal:
- Queues: These are like JIRA filters that show you a subset of issues that meet a certain criteria. Service desk agents use queues to prioritize and pick out requests to work on.
- Requests: These are what your end users (not agents), such as customers, submit to JIRA Service Desk. Under the hood, they are just normal JIRA issues. However, using the term request is less confusing in the context of a service desk environment. In short, requests are what your customers see, and issues are what agents see.
- Service desks: These are where customers will raise their requests. Under the hood, a service desk is a JIRA project of the Service Desk project type. Please refer to Chapter 2, Using JIRA for Business Projects, for more information on project types.
As shown in the following screenshot, when customers interact with requests, the user interface is very different to what agents will see. It is much simpler to show only the key information, such as the request description and its status. Customers cannot make changes to the request details, and can only add new comments or attachments to the request:
The key information of service desk is as follows:
- Request type: This represents the different types of requests customers can make. These can be anything including a problem report, help request, or general inquiry. When you create a new request type, JIRA creates a new issue type behind the scenes. One major feature of request type is that it allows you to specify a user-friendly name for it. While the actual issue type is called problem report, you can rename it and display it as Submit a problem report instead.
- Service desk: This is what agents will be working from. Each service desk has a front, customer-facing portal. Behind the scenes, a service desk is a JIRA project controlled by JIRA permissions, workflows, and other schemes.
- SLA: Service-level agreement defines the quality of service that is being guaranteed to your customers. In JIRA Service Desk, SLAs are measured in time, such as response time and overall time taken to resolve issues.
The first step to start working with JIRA Service Desk is to set it up. Since under the hood, a service desk is a JIRA project with a brand new user interface; you can either create a new service desk from scratch, or change an existing project to be of the Service Desk project type.
To create a new service desk, perform the following steps:
- Select the Create project option from the Projects drop-down menu.
- Choose a project template, such as IT Service Desk, from the Service Desk project type and click on Next.
- Enter the name and key for the new service desk project and click on Submit:
If you choose to use an existing JIRA project for your service desk, all you have to do is update the project's type by following these steps:
- Browse to the project administration page for the project you want to turn into a service desk.
- Select the Change project type option from the Actions menu.
- Select the Service Desk option and click on Change.
Once your service desk is created, you will be taken to your service desk user interface, as shown in the following screenshot:
Every service desk has two interfaces. One that will be used by you as the admin and members of your support team called agents. The second interface is called the customer portal, which is what customers will see and use to create requests and interact with agents. As you make configuration changes for your service desk, you can always preview the change by clicking on Customer channels and then the Visit the portal link from the left navigation panel, which will show you what the customer portal will look like.