Your service desk has finally moved from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to Atlassian Jira Service Desk and now all your queries are centralized. The work of your support agents is logged, processes are being harmonized, and key metrics and SLAs are in place and monitored. The roll-out of Service Desk was truly a huge win for your company, making agents more efficient in their daily work. Seems like the pieces of puzzle code-named “Service Desk Challenge” are falling into place…
Send me an email, please?!?!
However, you soon realize that there’s a critical piece of puzzle missing which directly affects the level of your customers’ satisfaction — a good system of email notifications. Despite numerous claims heard during the last 10 years that email is dead, most of the people who turn to SD for assistance would prefer to open an email message from the convenience of their inbox, rather than learning how to use the Service Desk portal. Who would want to navigate to Service Desk, log in, and search for a comment on your issue if you can simply read it from an email? Not to mention the obvious fact that email is accessible from ANY internet-connected user device.
But my emails are ugly...
Unfortunately, when it comes to customer notifications, Jira Service Desk has significant limitations that you should be aware of. Although initial creation of support tickets from email (inbound emails) is doing its job in most cases, follow-up messaging is nothing but adequate for a well-run help-desk system. If you ever wanted to send a file mentioned in the agent’s comment as an email attachment, add custom fields to the subject or message content, notify external addresses using CC/BCC copies, or merely have a custom layout with the look-n-feel of your company, then standard notifications will be not enough.
So, what can we do about it?
Generally speaking, you have two choices here:
A) Implement a custom solution based on Jira and Service Desk.
B) Use a specialized App that will do it for you.
Choosing Option A means this:
1) Get the requirements right (from the beginning).
2) Find a Jira consultant who is experienced in customization.
3) Implement the solution on the Java platform.
4) Maintain it to be compatible with future releases of Jira Service Desk.
5) If your team requests any changes to the notifications then go back to Step 1 and repeat...
Raley Notifications will help you out!
And, fortunately, there is one! Raley Email Notifications will solve your notifications challenges at a fraction of cost of Option A! Our add-on is a battle-tested solution that supports the features you were looking for in a professional email notifications system. It was developed to address the shortcomings of the standard JSD notification system while being easy to use. You can have it set up and running and sending the first emails in less than an hour. Without any programming, you can fully control the content of emails, send attachments, show any standard or custom field, and have your emails sent to ANY address. Plus, adding some HTML will make your messaging consistent with your company brand standards and make your customers feel more engaged. Raley Email Notifications is available on the Atlassian Marketplace for both Cloud and Server versions of Jira Service Desk.
With Raley Email Notifications, you can tailor notifications for every customer, since emails won't look like a canned JSD message, but instead carry relevant information specific to the type of helpdesk or support request. Thanks to a fully customizable design and message content, the customer will have a more personalized experience and develop more brand loyalty to your company. Make all your important information available from the convenience of customer's inbox!
Give Raley Email Notifications for Jira a try at your helpdesk and get your customers more engaged with your service team! Free for first 30 days!