A Hands-On Guide To Jira Service Management [2023]

Be it a small, mid-sized, or large business — improving the customer journey can improve customer satisfaction and boost revenue by up to 15%. 

JIRA by Atlassian provides a centralized platform where your customers can report bugs, reach out for assistance, explore your knowledge base, and submit requests for new changes.

What is JIRA Service Management? 

In February 2020, JIRA expanded the functionality of its Service Desk offering and rebranded the product into JIRA Service Management. 

Now known as JSM or Jira Service Management, the tool offers a range of features and functionalities to streamline service operations, manage incidents and requests, and track service-level agreements (SLAs). 

Furthermore, the software enables automation workflows and promotes collaboration among the support teams. Lastly, it offers excellent reporting capabilities. 

JIRA Service Management: Primary Use Cases 

JIRA service management unlocks the high-velocity teams enabling the DevOps and IT teams to swiftly resolve issues and deliver exceptional services. 

That being said, JSM isn’t designed for IT teams only. The large library of templates, custom reports, and add-ons such as Smart Checklists for Jira make it one of the richest options for any type of service team. 

Let’s look at the primary use cases of JSM: 

• IT Teams: Small, mid, or large IT teams can resolve issues and incidents, manage requests, track open requests, and whatnot. 
• HR Service Management: HR Teams use it for Employee onboarding, employee offboarding, change requests, answering emails, and for setting up knowledge bases. 
• Legal service teams: Employees and customers can set up legal requests, and your team can manage them in a single location. 
• Sales teams: Sales reps will benefit from transparent workflows, customization of incoming requests, and overall sales request management options.
• Marketing teams: Admins can use JSM to submit marketing requests, align the teams together, and send notifications to partners. There’s also the 24/7 marketing portal option that provides access to marketing services and offers excellent knowledge-sharing options. 
• Design teams: Collect responses and recommendations across various channels like email, phone, and support to instruct the design teams. Stakeholders or managers can request a design change, ask questions and review a design within. 
• Finance: Finance teams can manage their budget, spending, and other financial requests with JSM.
• Facilities: JSM offers people a centralized place to log maintenance issues, desk move and equipment requests, etc. and the knowledge portal can give them guidance and context regarding the request process.
• Analytics: You can capture and manage all your analytics data requests in one place. This helps you bring together the data from multiple sources like emails, chats, and portals making the process simpler and more transparent. 
• Customer service: Lastly let’s look at the most obvious use case – customer service. JSM helps you build a centralized queue for customer service requests, offers the tools to build a self-help portal, and gives access to goals-oriented SLAs for measuring customer service experiences.

Is Jira only for IT service team management? 

The short answer is no. JIRA has a vast number of templates and customizable reporting features that makes it a great fit for any service team. 

Jira is an ITSM software due to its high-velocity feature that connects the business teams with IT, and DevOps. Besides this, JSM can be widely used across various industries including Marketing, HR, operations, and businesses alike.

Jira Service Management Features

A common problem with most ITSM solutions is their steep learning curve. These products are complicated with many features for situational use. Jira tries to mitigate this complexity in service management by dividing existing functionality into seven categories: 

• Request Management helps bridge the gap between clients and employees by allowing them to communicate within one ecosystem.
• Incident Management helps the IT department to respond and resolve incidents at a higher pace.
• Problem Management is designed for analysis through grouping and lets you understand the root cause of problems and minimize future complications thanks to recorded data.
• Change Management offers more insights regarding any occurring changes to your IT and operations teams.
• Asset Management helps with keeping inventory records, tracking ownership, and lifecycles.
• Configuration Management grants more visibility and helps with minimizing risks through understanding service dependencies.
• Knowledge Management helps take the pressure off your team by introducing self-service functionality like a readily available knowledge base.

Now that we’ve taken a look at the  high-level overview of JIRA for customer support teams – let’s dive a bit deeper into the bread and butter of product – functionality!.. As well as a couple of Jira best practices for service teams.

Set Up Queues

Queues help resolve issues consistently and in a timely manner. The customer support team can prioritize the issues in a queue. 

Jira Service Management allows for separate queues dedicated to handling different types of requests such as incident requests, service requests, or change requests. 

The best part is that it doesn’t allow agents to add or edit existing queues. So, only the admins can set up the queues and prioritize issues accordingly. 

Once the admin has set up the queue, the agents and support teams can prioritize the queues using the preset filters. Consequently, the support team can solve critical or major issues faster and more efficiently. 

Dashboard and Reports

Think of Jira’s dashboard as the HQ for your Project Management efforts. This dashboard displays reporter issues and their status. It helps track the team’s progress. 

JSM comes with a number of reporting options that allow the service teams to effectively track the performance metrics, manage backlog and understand trends. It shows the total number of requests currently as well as their type. The real-time reporting feature effectively tracks the team’s performance via default or custom reports.

That being said, a brief overview won’t do the dashboard justice. Let’s take a deeper dive into the reporting options in JSM.

Collect & Analyze Customer Satisfaction

JIRA’s CAST (Collecting Customer Satisfaction) feedback is the most used feature for the service desk that enables users to collect feedback with a single click. 

The customer support team won’t have to go through a complicated process of collecting feedback. Instead, JSM offers a simplistic and intuitive mechanism to collect feedback.

To make life even easier, JIRA offers features like customer satisfaction scores and trends and reports that provide feedback on resolved issues. 

Forms

Forms are the easiest way to capture the issues and feedback from the customers and stakeholders. I would say, it is as simple as creating Google Forms. 

JIRA forms have customizable layouts, text fields, range fields, and conditional formatting that make them widely used for any department in the organization. 

For instance, a form for onboarding will reduce the manual workflow as it will automatically capture the customer information and their preferences. 

Admins can then view the form submission status, dates, and the form type in a single dashboard as shown below. 

Workflows and Automation

The workflow and automation in JIRA eliminate management of  repetitive and time-consuming customer service tasks. 

The best part? Automation for Jira is a no-code workflow builder that lets you create if this – then that rules that are quite flexible. You get a plethora of triggers, actions, and conditions that make good use of almost every action, screen or field in Jira.

You can use automation to assign tasks automatically based on current load, track SLAs or send out notifications to Email, Slack, and more. 

Channels

Omnichannel support makes sure that your customers have a variety of options for reaching your support team leading to improved customer satisfaction rates and custom retention. 

JIRA offers custom widgets for accessing service desks through various channels including: 

• Email
• Website
• Phone support
• Ticketing system
• Portals and many more

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

JIRA SLAs are effective in tracking whether the support team is efficiently able to fulfill customer needs. Admins can create the SLA and set up goals that specify the type of requests they want to track and the amount of time it takes to resolve the issue. 

It’s like setting up an internal goal to see if your team is efficient enough to meet it. An example of this could be resolving the requests within 2 hours or responding to high-priority issues within 24 hours, etc. 

SLAs look different to agents and customers. While the agents can look at the goal along with the time, the customers have access to the status only. 

Here is how agents look at SLAs: 

Customers view the SLAs with the time and status: 

Knowledgebase

The knowledge base plays a significant role in process optimization through self-service solutions. With the knowledge base, customers can search and access information regarding their issues, finding answers without the need to contact the customer service team. 

Your client’s aren’t the only ones to gain from this though. The integration of Confluence with JIRA helps create new articles and knowledge bases. Your internal teams can get a great helping hand with the extensive articles, detailed how-to’s, and context-rich guides. 

JIRA Reporting Management

As mentioned before, JIRA’s reports and dashboards are among the most prominent features of JSM. You can track common service project functions, specific goals, compare the resolved vs unresolved cases, and understand the trends a bit better when all of the data is laid out plainly in front of you. 

And, while the default reports are good and imperative you have the option of crafting custom reports that can be edited and tailored to the support team’s precise needs. 

There are a lot of metrics that a support team would want to track and check if their efforts are heading in the right direction. JSM makes use of these reports to keep track of whether you are meeting the SLA goals. 

Let’s read out the type of reports that you can create in the software. 

Default Reports 

It is a simple and basic report which can’t be edited. The 4 default reports are: 

• Workload report that measures the number of tasks assigned. 
• Customer satisfaction rates the satisfaction of users on a scale of 1-5. 
• Request deflected states how many times the customer read the knowledgebase articles in the portal.
• Request resolved reports the number of requests that were resolved with and without the help of knowledgebase. 

Custom Reports

The custom report entices advanced functions and can be edited according to the user’s needs. 

The custom reports are: 

• Created vs Resolved
• SLA met vs breached 
• SLA Success Rate
• Time to first resolve

Dashboards 

JIRA dashboard displays the essential metrics in real-time. These performance metrics are shown in the dashboard as gadgets. 

Gadgets are the info boxes that give users a glance into real-time data. 

Dashboards keep your data organized and assign and prioritize tasks within the team. For example, a marketing team will create a dashboard that comprises a calendar to plan tasks and a pie chart to create a visualization of current tasks. 

As the tasks get completed, the dashboard gets updated in real-time with changes in the gadget boxes. 

JQL reporting 

JQL or Jira Query Language helps users search for issues based on any custom field in your service requests. This may come in handy when you need to find issues that are assigned to a specific user or created on a specific date, etc. This is handy because you can easily filter all of your issues based on a parameter and export them as a CSV file. 

For example, you can easily find all of the issues that are being worked on by typing in:

You can then add a user name into the query to find the issues a certain user is working on:

Best Apps for JIRA Service Management

JIRA service management is undoubtedly the absolute powerhouse of managing heavy service management tasks and resolving customer issues. To extend its functionality, the Atlassian Marketplace has various add-ons. 

These add-ons help reduce context switching and improve productivity further. Let’s look at some of the most powerful JSM add-ons. 

Smart Checklist for Jira

Smart Checklist for Jira allows you to add a checklist to service management tickets. This way your customers will see them view mode only allowing them the comfort of clearly understanding what’s being done to their request.

Email this issue

This plugin integrates your JIRA service desk with the email service. Support teams receive emails as issues and the issues can be sent via email to external users. 

Brands can create emails and forms that align with their design to make it more personalized and professional. You can also set up event notifications for new changes to an issue. 

Tempo

This JIRA plugin keeps track of the time spent on each issue. Tempo timesheets create detailed time tracking sheets. 

Whether you want to keep track of meetings, and work events or generate billable and non-billable hours, Tempo Timesheets can be integrated with Jira Service Desk and your company’s Google calendar. 

This integration makes it simple and precise to track and log time spent on tasks.

Conclusion

Be it the agile IT team, HR, or Management team — JIRA simplifies customer service using its vast array of features and a rather intuitive interface. It becomes an even more valuable investment when used in tandem with plugins and add-ons that boost the effectiveness of service management. 

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Article by Denys Velykozhon