BLOG

In the latter part of 2020 and so far into 2021, one of Interfuze’s Atlassian experts - Rajat (Raj) Saddi - has helped a number of Perth businesses and WA government agencies implement and use Jira Service Management - to enhance the traditional IT Help Desk operations. 

It is also a platform that we at Interfuze use internally to manage IT and customer support requests that come in from our clients and from within our own team members. 

A trend that Raj has seen through his Jira Service Management is that “technology and remote work has changed the way businesses are done these days, and this has also applied to IT service desks.” 

As a result, many of our clients seem to be advocating for an expansion of service scope for the IT Help Desk that can deliver:

• More collaboration;
• Self service through knowledge bases;
• Integration of intelligence with automation;
• An increase in service quality and speed;
• Better customer service and satisfaction. 

So how does Jira Service Management help tick all of the above objectives and why is it gaining so much traction for service based businesses? Let’s find out more!

What is Jira Service Management?

Jira Service Management is the next generation of Jira Service Desk, providing all the features you’d expect from a Service Desk solution for a fraction of the price of other companies such as ServiceNow. 

Jira Service Management provides a fully ITIL compliant service desk offering out of the box with built in support for SLA’s, satisfaction surveys, automation and much more. 

However, Jira Service Management is not just for IT service teams. Each team - like IT, HR, legal, sales - can have their own customer support portal with workflows and knowledge bases tailored to them. JSM comes with many different portals ‘out of the box’, need a Facilities portal? JSM comes with one. Need an HR portal to onboard new employees? JSM comes with one.  All of these templates are easy to tweak, extend via drag and drop UI to customise to exactly what you need, quickly. No template to suit your needs? Start from a blank slate to build what you need using the same easy UI.

The feedback that we’ve had over and over that makes Jira Service Management stand out from the crowd is this ease of configuration which is a true game changer in terms of overall cost. Configuration is visual, drag and drop with no development skills needed. Unlike other Service Desk systems there’s no need to get a consultant in if you want to add a field or change a workflow if you don’t want to. 

To give a real life example we were able to set up JSM from scratch to go live within 4 weeks for DLGSC, providing a fully branded Service Desk with multiple types of requests, customised forms and workflows and (using Atlassian Access) fully integrated with Azure Active Directory for SSO. It’s not always that quick but it can be!

Exploring the capabilities of Jira Service Management 

Here’s a short workflow to see how Jira Service Management works:

1. Receive customer request: Customers can submit their service requests to your team through an internal or external customer portal (that you can customise), an embeddable widget (that you can add to your website or existing online platform), or via email or APIs.

     Users can see all their requests, across all projects,  from the portal

2. Respond to customer requests: Service project agents work on customer requests. These requests are tracked as issues in a queue. Issue progress is set up by a workflow that can include steps (similar to Jira project management) like In progress or Needs approval.
   ‍

      Clicking on the key shows the detail to the agent:

3. Build self-serve knowledge base: You can also leverage the power of Atlassian’s product Confluence to set up your own knowledge base within your own project. Knowledge base articles can appear on your portal so your customers can help themselves before reaching out to you. Of course this is a great time saving capability for your team and overall business. 

In addition, there are powerful additional features that come out of the box with Jira Service Management, which all contribute to ensuring faster, better and more effective customer and team experience:

• Modern incident management: All Jira Service Management Cloud plans come with major incident management - powered by Opsgenie, another Atlassian product. Features such as on-call scheduling, alerting, incident swarming allow you to instantly let the right people know about critical issues while giving them the context they need to take action. 
• DevOps change management support: Lighten the load and work more efficiently with automated change risk assessments, advanced approval workflows, and integrations with CI/CD tools like Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, and CircleCI.
• Automate bulk actions: Bulk actions and machine learning capabilities can be used to intelligently categorise, link or transition similar issues, and take action quickly.

A Service Management of choice by businesses

When you learn about and see the capabilities of Jira Service Management, you can see why many service based businesses and teams are turning to this software!

Opportunities for time saving, more organised way of working, better customer support and experience and more efficient, effective way of doing repetitive bulk actions can be answered with features and capabilities of Jira Service Management. 

In addition to that, our own experience as a Jira and Service Desk expert in Perth shows us that businesses and teams choose this platform because:

1. Easy to use and implement fast - teams can leverage a low-code approach to defining and refining their own workflows and record types! 
2. Suitable for all teams - teams that interact with IT or have an external facing service – like legal, HR, finance, sales and marketing – can leverage Jira Service Management to build out their own service culture and service operations. 
3. Across the board visibility - give teams and the broader organisation visibility into work happening across the entire company.
4. Good DevOps at work - your teams can be more effective across the entire IT service lifecycle – from planning to building, testing, deploying, changing, and optimising.

See Jira Service Management at work!

Interfuze is one of only two Atlassian Partners in Perth. We specialise in providing across the board support services in Perth including Jira Service Management, Jira, Confluence, and Atlassian and Jira Licensing. 

Check out our recent successful implementation of Jira Service Management for the Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries. 

If you and your teams are keen to see Jira Service Management in action, we can show you first hand how it works through our own internal use. 

Get in touch to book a demo session or to further chat about your service desk requirements.