• Article
  • Oct.8.2014

3 good reasons to update to JIRA Service Desk v2

  • Oct.8.2014
  • Reading time mins

On September 9th, Atlassian released JIRA Service Desk v2 with a clear goal : improve your (and your customers’) experience. Various new features and improvements were announced as well as a new pricing model based on Agents. Would you be a newbie on JIRA Service Desk, or a v1 qualified user, here are my 3 good reasons to discover this new release…

#1 – E-mail : A new communication channel for your customers

Connection to the customer portal is sometimes a constraint, or worse, a loss of precious time when raising a new Incident. You can now improve your productivity easily by creating request just by sending an email. JIRA Service Desk v2 let you setup an email account (SMTP Server + mail address parameters) directly through its interface, then convert every received mail to a request (Summary is email object, description is email content…). Do you want to know more about it? Just take a look here.   Canal Email

#2 – Interface 2.0 : smooth, simple and efficient

Following JIRA roadmap, JIRA Service Desk got its interface rebuilt and improved. This is remarkable at first sight on the “People” tab : you can now directly add Agents, Collaborators and manage Customers via lists inside JIRA Service Desk. You can also have a quick look at your Agents’ activity (assigned/solved requests) via the tab. Finally, a new button let you manage, in a single click, access restrictions for your customer portal : you can either authorize everybody to use it or choose to allow only signed-in users or even listed (by admin) users.Suivi d'activité des Agents JSD v2

 #3 – Pricing based on Agents

Before JIRA Service Desk v2, each person involved in the service desk management (from customer to agent) needed a licence token to benefit from full features of the product. This time is gone! JIRA Service Desk v2 offers a brand new (and simplified) pricing model :

  • Service Desk Users don’t need any licence (neither JIRA nor JIRA Service Desk) anymore
  • Collaborators only need a valid JIRA licence
  • Agents must have both JIRA and JIRA Service Desk v2 licence

You now just have to pay for your number of Agents by stages (More details…).

Quick-Tip : What do you call a JIRA Service Desk Agent?

A JIRA Service Desk Agent is someone processing your requests : he/she will use your workflow to manage all incoming requests from your customers thanks to both customer portal and JIRA Native panel. Agents also have specific permissions such as :

  • Display reports and queues
  • Use internal comments
  • Manage linked Knowledge Base
  • Manage requests’ linked customers

A user is referred as an Agent if he/she belongs to the default group “service-desk-agents” or if you grant him/her the global permission “JIRA Service Desk Agent Access“.

What Atlassian says about it

JIRA Service Desk v2 was introduced at Summit 2014 where we had the opportunity to chat with Edwin, Product Manager, about this new release. Discover his interview : [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBOYWcsMVyw” title=”Atlassian%20Edwin%27s%20interview” autohide=”1″ fs=”1″]

To sum up…

This new release of JIRA Service Desk will clearly improve your Service Desk experience through JIRA thanks to clearer pricing and interface along with a new communication channel for your customers. Do as I did : try it, adopt it !

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