Get started with service requests in Jira Service Management (2024)

Overview

Service request management is a practice that helps organizations standardize the way they respond, coordinate, and fulfill service requests.

  • Request fulfillment is the process of resolving a customer or employee’s service request and refers to managing the entire lifecycle of all service requests.
  • The service desk provides the primary contact point where customers ask for help or request services.

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Jira Service Management is highly configurable and can be easily set up to meet the needs of a diverse set of service delivery teams. Built on the Jira platform, Jira Service Management brings IT operations, development, and business teams together to respond to business changes and deliver great service experiences fast.

Jira Service Management offers users a single place to go for help. Through a centralized global customer portal, employees or customers can easily access every service desk across an organization, from IT Support to HR, Facilities, Legal, and Finance teams.

Service request management projects also come with easy to edit request types and workflows, flexible service level agreement (SLA) settings, customizable queues, automated request management, email channels with adjustable notifications, and real-time reporting capabilities among other features.

The service request management process

At Atlassian, we recommend that service requests be handled as a distinct workstream to help teams focus on delivering more valuable work and better enabling the organization. While there are some variations in the way a service request can be captured and fulfilled, it’s important to focus on driving standardization to improve overall service quality and efficiency.

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An example of the service request process, in brief:

  1. A customer (internal or external) requests help from your service portal or via email. For example, a new employee needs access to a specific software license to do their job.
  2. The service team assesses the request alongside pre-defined approval and qualification processes. If needed, they send the request for financial or business approval.
  3. A service desk agent works to fulfill the service request or moves the request to someone who can better assist the customer, if necessary. Jira Service Management allows you to easily move requests between different team projects or create linked issues between projects for seamless collaboration.
  4. After resolving the request, the agent closes the ticket and consults the customer to make sure they are satisfied by collecting customer feedback.

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For more information, check out our Service Request Management page.

How to get started with service request management in Jira Service Management

Create a service project

Jira Service Management has a variety of project templates to help teams get set up quickly by creating projects tailored to a specific team or use. These templates include pre-configured request types, workflows, and other relevant features.

To create a project using a project template:

  1. Select Projects > Create project.
  2. Choose a service management template > Select Use template.
  3. Name your project.
  4. Create a project key or use the generated key.
  5. Choose if you would want to share settings with an existing project. If yes, specify the name of the existing project.
  6. Select Create project.
Learn more about Jira Service Management projects

Add your team members

Once you have your service project established, start inviting team members. To get your team involved, start by adding each team member as agents to your service project.

  • Go to Project settings > People.
  • Select Add people.
  • Enter the agent’s username or email.
  • Choose their role from the dropdown (Service Desk Team).
  • Select Add .
  • They'll get an email with a link to your project.
Learn more about setting up service project users to work on requests

Customize your online portal(s) and help center

The online portal(s) and help center offercustomization options that help you make sure your customers find the information they need while delivering a consistent brand experience. Available customizations include a login message, an announcement, name, logo, banner, and the home page layout.

To customize the online portal(s) and the help center:

  1. Go to Project settings > Portal settings.
  2. Edit your portal configuration and portal groups via their respective tabs.
  3. Choose the relevant option, make changes, and select Save changes.
  4. Under Customize your help center, you’ll see a link to customize your help center.
Learn more about customizing the help center and portal(s)

Set up email requests

You can set up a service project email addressso you can capture requests from customers who email your team with a question, incident report, or anything else in a single place. Requests that are sent to your service project’s email address are automatically added to your queues, so your team can focus on customers without worrying about missing requests or managing multiple inboxes.

Jira Service Management projects come with a default email address, or you can add a custom email address that is already in use by your team.

To add a custom email account:

  1. From your service project, select Project settings > Email requests.
  2. Choose your email service provider and follow the prompts to link your account.
Learn more about receiving requests from an email address

Configure request type forms and associated fields

Jira Service Management allows you to customize the types of service requests your project will use and the fields associated with those request types. Effective request form configuration ensures your team is collecting all the necessary information from your customers upfront to improve service delivery.

To modify request types:

  1. Navigate to Project settings > Request types.
  2. Select on the request type you would like to edit or create a new request type by selecting add new request type.
  3. Modify the fields and information that will be displayed on the request form and agent view by using the available tabs.
  4. Select Save changes.
  5. Add/remove request forms to your portal groups. Navigate to Project settings > Portal settings. Select the portal groups tab to add, remove, and rearrange request forms within your portal groups.
Learn more about request types and fields

Service request management best practices and tips

Shift left with self-service

Shifting left is the concept of moving request fulfillment as close to the front line (and the customer) as possible with a focus on self-service. For instance, a knowledge base with searchable articles can work wonders in deflecting tickets. Additionally, customizing your intake request forms to capture all relevant information upfront can also help you eliminate long back-and-forth conversations.

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Customers want a single place to go for help. Centralize the help seeker experience and make it as easy to access and use as possible. Many organizations have created a self-service portal only for it to gather (metaphorical) dust. Learn from their mistakes, and create something based on the unique culture of your organization. Remember that even if you build the most powerful self-service system, it’s worthless if customers can’t easily find it.

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Leverage automation

When you incorporate automation into your self-service capability, you reduce the overall workload for your service team by removing common repetitive tasks. For example, use automation to speed up the follow-up communications your agents complete manually today, improve the way you communicate with customers and employees, and keep stakeholders updated on estimated resolution times. Automated responses for certain requests provide useful information to the customer and reduce the workload for the agent. Customers often don’t know where to seek help from, and automation can also be used to route service requests to the appropriate team for expedited resolution.

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Learn more about Jira Service Management automation

Build a knowledge-centric service portal

When support teams integrate Confluence with Jira Service Management, knowledge is put to work by deflecting requests or streamlining the request process. Designed around search, Jira Service Management uses machine learning technology called Smart Graph to recommend the right knowledge base articles and request types as users search for answers or complete request forms. The more users search in the portal, the better the results become. When support teams put answers to common questions directly at users’ fingertips, they encourage self-service that satisfies customers and reduces request volume. This frees up time for agents to focus on solving more critical issues.

Jira Service Management also improves agent productivity by providing immediate access to knowledge base articles right from an issue or request. Based on the type of request, agents can choose from recommended knowledge articles or search within existing articles to respond to the user’s request. With Jira Service Management and Confluence, IT teams can easily author new knowledge base articles and build a knowledge base library that fits their users’ needs.

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Learn more about using Confluence and Jira Service Management together

Deliver service on-the-go with mobile

With Atlassian’s Jira mobile app, you and your team can stay in the know with push notifications and deliver services from anywhere. You can stay on top of your queues by quickly assigning or transitioning issues with a single swipe. Teams can get notified instantly on breached SLAs and requests that are assigned, reported, watched, and @mentioned. You can also personalize your notifications and receive only what is most important to you.

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Learn more about the Jira Service Management mobile app

Measure your support service with KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics chosen to gauge how well a team performed against agreed standards, such as uptime, first-call resolution, and time-to-recovery after service outages.

Every team has different tracking and reporting needs. As a starting point, we recommend these commonly used KPIs:

Service Support Metrics

  1. Mean time to resolve
  2. Mean time to respond
  3. Size of request backlog
  4. Created versus resolved
  5. SLA success rate
  6. Cost per ticket
  7. CSAT (customer satisfaction)

Incident Support Metrics

  1. Incidents over time
  2. Mean time between failures
  3. Mean time to acknowledge
  4. Mean time to resolve
  5. % of incidents resolved within SLA
  6. % of outages due to incidents
  7. Uptime

With powerful real-time reporting in Jira Service Management, you have visibility into your team’s performance metrics to learn, adjust, and improve your service. Use default reports to quickly compare metrics, such as issues created versus resolved, time to resolution, met SLAs versus breached, and more. Then build custom reports to query additional data combinations.

Learn more about native reporting in Jira Service Management

Focus on tracking and improving CSAT

To understand users’ satisfaction with the quality of support, CSAT (customer satisfaction) is an important metric to measure. Customer feedback helps identify strengths and weaknesses in service quality, engage and motivate agents to improve scores, and understand if agents need mentoring and training.

Short simple surveys are most effective in generating customer responses. Jira Service Management provides a built-in satisfaction survey, consisting of a 5-star rating with a brief comment field.

Learn more about CSAT

Get smart about SLAs

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are great for tracking day-to-day progress. SLAs define agreed-upon terms for services and manage customer expectations, such as promising a response from support within 24 hours.

In Jira Service Management, teams have the flexibility to create SLA goals for just about any combination of parameters. Instead of relying on consultants for custom queries or updating hard-coded SLAs, configuring SLAs can be done in-house and changed on the fly. Don’t even think about building elaborate Excel spreadsheets. Easily track SLA performance with pre-built reports that update in real-time.

Learn more about SLAs

Utilize Jira Dashboards

In addition to reports, Jira dashboards provide another alternative to configure and display accurate, detailed information at a glance. Dashboards can be created system-wide or shared with a group of users.

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Learn more about Jira dashboards and gadgets
About Jira Service Management

Overview

Read guide
Getting Started

Incident Management

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Get started with service requests in Jira Service Management (2024)

FAQs

How to start Jira Service Management? ›

Quick start guide
  1. Step 1 - Set up and customize your project. Create your service project. ...
  2. Step 2 - Set up your request types and customize your queues. Set up your request types. ...
  3. Step 3 - Add your team members and customers to your service project. Add team members to your project.

What are service requests in Jira? ›

In Jira Service Management, customers are people who request help from your service project. Customers can send requests to agents, and sometimes agents might raise a request for customers. For example, if an agent is taking a customer request by phone, they can raise their request on behalf of that customer.

How long does it take to implement Jira Service Management? ›

If one has no experience of Jira, I would say you need at least a month, as one needs to get familiar with the menus and many sub-menus of the project settings as well as Jira as a whole. There is quite a bit of overlapping. I would also say set up some goals and milestones on what needs to be achieved.

How do I approve Jira Service Management? ›

  1. What are approvals?
  2. Set up approval steps.
  3. Add a new custom field to a service project.
  4. Add an approval step to a workflow.
  5. Define approvers for a request type.
  6. Allow customers to choose approvers.
  7. Add a conditional field to a service project.
  8. Manage settings for approval by email and chat.

How to raise a service request in Jira? ›

  1. From your service project, select Create.
  2. Select a request type. Your request types are based on the project template you chose, but you can change them or add new ones.
  3. Fill out the fields and select Send.

How do I get started with Jira? ›

7 steps to get started in Jira
  1. Step 1 - Create a project. Log into your Jira site. ...
  2. Step 2 - Pick a template. ...
  3. Step 3 - Set up your columns. ...
  4. Step 4 - Create an issue. ...
  5. Step 5 - Connect your tools. ...
  6. Step 6 - Invite your team. ...
  7. Step 7 - Move work forward.

How many days required to learn Jira? ›

How long will it take to learn Jira? Most people who use Jira require at least 10 hours of training before they feel comfortable with all the different features available.

Why does Jira take so long to start? ›

Jira will rely on the browse to cache those resources also on client side as it will take time to transfer those files on the network, especially if the network has high latency. Caching the files on the browser will have those files loaded from the client disk, and will save the time of the network transfer.

What is the limit of Jira Service Management? ›

What do I get with each plan?
FreeStandard
User limitUp to 3 agentsUp to 20,000 agents
Customer limitUnlimitedUnlimited
Storage2 GB250 GB
SupportCommunity support9–5 Standard Support
11 more rows

How do I Create a SLA in Jira Service Management? ›

To create an SLA:
  1. From your service project, go to Project settings > SLAs. All existing SLAs are displayed here.
  2. Select Add SLA.
  3. In the field next to the clock icon, enter a new name for the SLA or choose an existing name. ...
  4. Set goals and conditions for the SLA. ...
  5. Select Save.

How do you manage queues in Jira Service Management? ›

To manage the order of queues that appear on your project sidebar:
  1. From your service project, go to Queues.
  2. Select Queue settings.
  3. On the Queues tab, select Reorder queues.
  4. Drag and drop the queues to arrange them according to how you want them to appear on your project sidebar.
  5. Select Done.

How do I Create a workflow in Jira Service Management? ›

2 answers
  1. From the projects board, click the gear icon in the bottom left.
  2. Select "Projects"
  3. Click on the back arrow next to "Jira Settings"
  4. Select "Issues" then Select "Workflows".
  5. Click the Add Workflow in the top right and give your new flow a name and begin.
Mar 8, 2019

Can Jira be used for Service Management? ›

Jira Service Management offers an intuitive self-service portal for bugs, feature requests, incidents, and other development-related requests from the customers (internal or external) that the development team supports.

How to start Jira service in Windows? ›

If you didn't install JIRA as a service you'll need to start and stop JIRA manually.
  1. To start JIRA run <installation-directory>\bin\start-jira.bat.
  2. To stop JIRA run <installation-directory>\bin\stop-jira.bat.
Jun 18, 2024

How to create a Jira Service Management project? ›

Create a service project
  1. enter a name for your project.
  2. create a project key or use the key generated for you.
  3. select the type of team that will be using the project to manage incoming requests.
  4. select Change template if you want to switch to a different template.

How to set up Jira Itsm? ›

Set up your ITSM project
  1. Create your project using the IT service management template.
  2. Brand your portal so users know they're in the right place.
  3. Set up email requests so users can email requests directly to your project.
  4. Set up services.
  5. Invite your team to your service project by adding them as agents.

References

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