JIRA Service Desk Software

JSD has a lot to offer, but requires a lot to learn

JSD offers a lot for any company needing to maintain a service desk to manage the support requests it handles from its clients/customers. Because it is a Jira (Atalassian) product, it is most likely utilized along with other Jira tools, and plays quite well with those. Due to this integration aspect, thought, the layers of security necessitated within user settings requires a considerable amount of learning/training, which is not easily attained without paying for it from Atalassian. And, while I understand, respect (and even applaud) the market-oriented principle of this, it does seem a bit intentional that there are no reliable helps available outside of Atlassian (for example, any tutorials you will find on YouTube for assisting with certain user configs, settings, steps, etc. are applicable to much older versions of the software, and to a great extent, are not applicable to the current version). This would not be a negative aspect if Jira did a much better job at keeping their own internal (free) help docs, etc. up to date, so as to apply to the current version, as well. Instead, if one wants highly dependable "helps" it appears the best way to achieve that is to pay Atlassian for their training courses (at prices that are obviously calibrated toward larger companies/corporations. And blindly undertaking such would seem risky if judged by the extent to which their free user tools are kept up to date. This is not, to my knowledge, the common experience with most apps.

Pros

- Lots of tools in one place
- Integrates well with other apps (especially other Atlassian products)
- UI is clean and user friendly (customizable to a sensible extent)
- Contains useful metrics that are easy to configure and gain reports from
- Has multiple layers of user settings available for custom configuration to correlate to preferred levels of access among agents, customers, etc.

Cons

- Email bounce in frequently fails (bugs?)
- Depth of Jira admin user knowledge required for strong mastery of this app; time consuming to acquire a reliable user knowledge (which is necessary to utilize the app with the least bit of efficiency)
- Help docs, support mechanism unreliable/outdated (needs to be fresh and current to be applicable to present version of app)
- Confusing settings requirements for some user modifications needs (esp. where mapping/editing workflow schemes are concerned)
- Completely inadequate amount of general helps/tutorials available outside of Atlassian (YouTube, Google search, etc. for example) which seems a bit suppressed by design. Atlassian offers extensive training, but at a premium cost.
- Costly for the overall effectiveness it provides, after factoring these negatives along with the user time required to really learn the application.

Highly customizable and integrates well with the Atlassian ecosystem

Customization, integrations, workflows, SLAs

Pros

Newbies to JIRA Service Desk can get a service desk project up and running in less than 30 minutes. If your organization is already using JIRA for issue tracking, then having a help desk with Service Desk is a no brainer. It allows you to integrate software teams and IT teams better within the same ecosystem.

The benefit of JIRA Service Desk, when compared with other help desk tools, is the customizability of your workflow. You can set up a workflow to be simple (with Open > In Progress > Closed statuses) or complex (with other statuses like On Hold or Waiting for Customer).

SLAs are highly configurable, with the power of JIRA's JQL functionality. So one can conjure up a query to fit their SLA needs. With the addition of custom fields, a Service Desk administrator can create fields to capture important information to streamline the help desk process.

Having Confluence also provides more benefits in which you can integrate an existing knowledge base space to a help desk project and self-serve your customers.

Finally, being in the Atlassian ecosystem enables you to add additional functionality and enhancements with the use of Apps. There are close to 1500 apps available for JIRA, and many are constantly updated by the app developers.

Cons

Administering JIRA Service Desk (and JIRA in general) can be daunting for a new user. With a number of customizations that one can do in a JIRA application, there will come a time where there can be a performance impact on the environment if the application is not governed well.

The Customer Portal (customer facing interface) is spartan in terms of customization. You can only customize so much, but it is limited in terms of branding it to suit your company's design specs.

Unlike others, doesn't need complex configuration

With the help of Service Desk we get feedback from users about the bugs they find in the product. As the result, we fix them really fast. By adding fields that users need to add while submitting bug, we decrease time that is needed to reproduce bug or clarify the issue. Also, we can communicate with user directly if needed. At the same time user can always get back and see status of ticket they submitted. Also, it says a lot when you see Atlassian using its own product and using it really well.

Pros

When you use this application as an addition to JIRA, it is a great tandem. I adviced my company to use Service Desk when we were discussing how to receive bugs and ad-hoc requests. We are using this application fro several years and we do not think about changing it.

Cons

The only bad point that I can mention about Service Desk is its price. A lot of clients I worked with complained about it. They manage really carefully the number of users that are Agents (users you actually pay for), and get really upset if they were not carefull enough and their bill was higher then they expected.

Dig Deep Before Buying

It has solved some of our immediate business needs out-of-the-box or with moderate configuration effort. But as a full solution it is missing a handful of simple, but crucial, features. It definitely "feels" like a second version. It needs a third.

Pros

JSD is relatively intuitive and easy to learn without needing tons of documentation. Initial pricing is attractive. A decent plugin community fills some gaps, but be expected to pay on top of the initial JSD pricing.

Cons

Many "obvious" features are either missing or do not work as expected.

For example: in many cases, once an internal user is added to an issue, they no longer receive notification about internal comments. This is completely unintuitive, unexpected, and has caused many people frustration: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-3410

Another example: Email traffic about an issue is *always* public. Do not allow your staff to reply to JSD's emails as customers will also get emailed a copy! https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-3499

The worst part is, despite there being a few years' of discussion, and new comments added monthly by newly-affected JSD customers, Atlassian has no comments on the issues.

In some cases a plugin (more $) can help, but in some cases even the plugin manufacturers can't help as JSD doesn't expose enough info in their plugin API.

Excellent for big projects.

A very compelta application, useful for small and large teams, but more thought for the big ones, allows you to have a complete follow-up of your project, apply agile methodologies and correct errors and have a record of them, it is excellent, use it and you will like it!!

Pros

Jira has very useful tools for managing projects, in my opinion you exploit its advantages when they are big teams, its main advantage is the follow-up to the development and progress of the projects, the errors that arise during the development process and the management operational, it helps you see more, to improve development times and correct errors for your next project, also has free trials so you can enjoy its benefits.

Cons

The truth is that it is a very complete program, but I think your biggest benefit is when you are big projects, if you are a small team I think other tools will be better suited, besides the price is a bit high.

JIRA Service desk is integral to our customer support, even though extensibility is a problem

Pros

I think my favorite feature is the internal comments. It's simple, but really helps to have a side conversation with your peers about an issue before commenting to the customer.

Cons

I'm also an Atlassian plugin developer, and the JIRA Service Desk Java API is pretty awful to work with compared to the APIs for JIRA Core and JIRA Software. That makes extending JIRA Service Desk way harder.

I also don't quite like the stripped-down UI offered to customers through the customer portal. As a regular JIRA user, I resent missing features, like being unable to edit my own comments or being unable to see a preview of any rich text that I might add (such as *bolded* or _italicized_ words).

I have also heard from my peers that SLA calculations are really tricky to get right, and often behave in ways you wouldn't expect.

Marketing Team Uses JIRA Service Desk to Handle All Requests for Marketing

Our marketing team knows exactly the status of any request of our team. And so do the requesters.

Pros

JIRA Service Desk is a great way to enable everyone at our company to request things from Marketing with tailored forms for each type of request .... for example, business cards, collateral for events, changes to our website, updating sales enablement content, go-to-market support, schwag requests, etc. No more emailing stuff. Employees just fill out a form and can keep up with the status of their request. Our Marketing team just goes through each queue a few times a week and delivers a transparent and trackable service. We know the status of everything....especially the requests that are behind....waaay behind. Which is great.

Cons

It takes some expertise to set it up to suite a team's particular need. Most teams will need some JIRA/JIRA Service Desk expertise from someone to set it up. Once that happen, using it is easy.

Mostly excellent.

Pros

JIRA Service Desk is a customer-first application. The integration with the Confluence knowledge base is excellent and the tool as a whole provides a streamlined, dead simple customer experience. Launching your first project only takes about a week--very speedy return on investment!

There are tons of add-ons in the Atlassian ecosystem that help extend functionality if there's something the tool won't do out-of-the-box.

Atlassian support has been responsive and helpful every time I've had to reach out to them.

Cons

JIRA Service Desk is not an all-encompassing solution for all things help desk or customer support. Language support for the customer portal is OK, but basically non-existent if you're using a linked Confluence knowledge base. There are many add-ons in the ecosystem that help extend functionality--but each one increases the complexity and maintenance overhead.

Up and running in no time

Less pinging back an forth with customers to get all the information you need to help them. Easy to use form fields and form instructions make sure customers always fill out the right information from the start. No decisions made in endless email threads that then get lost. Communication is in context and visible to everyone involved.

Pros

Supports agile implementation since it its real easy to get started and adjust as you go.
Escalation is seamless since it is inside JIRA where our developers work.
Great user experience! Clean user interface and well thought trough features.
Easy to integrate and extend with the most complete API on the market.

Cons

No dynamic forms, i.e. you can show or hide fields depending on the answer given in another field (but can be solved through add-on).

Love the tool! it is newer product with evolving capabilities.

Teams can manage their own service desk: - Can manage own fields - Can manage own workflows - Can Manage and Create own services

Pros

Individual teams can setup their own customer portals and service offerings without having special permissions. Our Teams are moving from our current Service desks products to Atlassian organically based on their experience (no company mandate)

Cons

There is no built in knowledge base to the product, you need to use Atlassian's confluence. additionally, Knowledge bases are linked 1 to 1 to a service desk project for how our organization works.

The base product is limited and need to use 3rd party plugins from the atlassian marketplace to provide capabilities that are standard with most other products.

Jira Service Desk Review

It is an excellent ticketing system, easy to use, and track incidents.

Pros

I used this software when I worked on a technical support help desk. I liked that the dashboard functionality and the ability to customize your view. There is a variety of widgets that are supported that assist with efficiency.

Cons

Our company worked with a separate company that also utilized this product. We created separate incidents in both systems if their assistance was needed. We noted each ticket with the relationship to the other's Jira system. While working in two systems was a con in regards to ease of use, this is not a fault of the software itself as there are obvious security issues in linking two companies together.

A Great App With Some Annoying Flaws

Overall, Jira Service Desk provides a well rounded package for anyone looking to build a customer portal for helpdesk-type teams. It's an excellent choice if your company is already using Jira Software or Jira Business because the use workflow and editing workflow are very familiar and are one in the same for many things (e.g. Workflows & Screens)

Pros

- Adds helpful features that Jira Software doesn't support
- Clean customer portal that allows for easy(ish) ticket creation
- Integrates with Confluence to provide helpful articles to customers
- Customizable time tracking SLAs with support for custom calenders and start/pause/stop automation

Cons

- The editing workflow is confusing and spread out
- Lacks some common features that Jira Software had included for years (e.g removing email signatures from email-submitted tickets and comments)
- Requires expensive add on to group multiple projects into one queue

Visibility made easy :-)

Handling of issues Visibility of issues Service Desk reporting Change Request management and identifying the priorities in developments

Pros

Level of functionality available and the level of detail is fantastic and easily configured. I managed to completely configure on my own with the use of the articles in the kb and minimal support from Atlassian.

Cons

Difficult to completely personalize for my company completely as i am on cloud version. As an example it is not possible to have email sender not have atlassian in the email address or to make the look and feel 100% as i want it to be.

Can also get a little overwhelming with the amount of add-ons to get the functionality you want for the price you want.

We have been using the Jira service desk for a couple of years - easy to get setup and started with

The Jira Support Desk provides relatively straightforward integration with other Atlassian tools such as Bitbucket, Confluence and Tempo - we are ably to scope our support effort, track the resources expended and provide timely insight.

Pros

The best part of the package is the ease of implementation, particularly the hosted subscription - no worries about hardware, security or backups!

Cons

For the subscription implementation, there are occasionally changes made by the vendor for maintenance or security reasons without clear advance notification or a complete understanding of the impacts. As with any SaaS solution, vendor changes can be disruptive - even sometimes deprecating used features.

Service Desk, a great intake tool for Jira

We needed a way to take in user issues and then sort them into the teams that need to handle them. Service desk provides a great interface for our current issue tracking system, so it was a no-brainer.

Pros

We use this software as a front-facing user portal to submit bugs, hardware issues, service requests, etc. I find that it performs this task admirably.

Cons

The system for queueing things is clunky until you figure out it's features, then it's a little slow. I would love the ability to define custom actions on the issue page to remove multiple click issue transitions, like 'transfer to x project'

A Great Ticketing System

Pros

We have just begun using a Jira-based ticketing system to gain support from one of our vendors. So we are users rather than Administrators. However, our experience as users has made us strongly consider Jira for future projects and support implementations.

It has a fantastic user interface with a decent amount of features. That said, our vendor did a slow-drip on features for us, and I'm not even convinced that they have enabled all of them yet. But just from what we've experienced, we love the software.

Cons

The slow-drip of features from our vendor (such as seeing who is posting a response) initially made us think that Jira was to blame, but that clearly wasn't the case. I am still uncertain of whether certain features just aren't available or haven't been turned on for us, but I am confident that Jira is a reliable tool for ticketing management.

Honestly, the bar is pretty low for ticketing software in my opinion, as I've seen a lot of poor software in this environment. Jira is definitely the best that I have seen so far, and I am hoping it will continue to improve. I look forward to us potentially using Jira to support our own users, so I can see it from an Administrative point-of-view.

Honest review

Overall I would recommend Jira, it can be time consuming to initially set up, once that is done it's smooth sailing.

Pros

As a software Tester, I have found over the years that Jira is essential for tracking bugs with our developers and seeing which issues are ready for deployment. This softaware can be used really for any type of business.

Cons

Creating Custom search filters was the hardest part, as there was not a lot of documentation at the time. I feel like there are a lot of features that are in the software that we do not utilize due to the lack of documentation.

Awesome ITSM tool

We use it for getting tickets from our customers and internal employee ranging from bugs, vacation request, improvement, order coffe and legal advice! Very flexible. We use also it attached to a strong asset management add-on

Pros

Easy out of the box customer portal
email integration
extreme powerful workflow
lots of integration available
Great integration with Confluence!
Extremely expandable with tons of add-on

Cons

no native PBX integration but you can build one

Jira Service desk review

I was a very happy user of Jira on the whole, and I am certainly missing it now that I have moved onto another product. I felt that it allowed many users to be involved in the issues raised, which kept all of the discussion in one central location, rather then firing off in email chains that it's easy to be omitted from.

Pros

This is a very useable service desk, as it allows users to communicate freely if the issue that needs to be required impacts more people than the original poster.

Cons

At time, Jira can be a little restrictive, but that is more to do with the way the product is set up by each organisation.

Easy to use , not hard to setup, lots of addons

Easy and fast setup, high end user acceptance

Pros

Very easy to use customer portal, easy to setup SLAs, many addons for almost anything. Potentially indefinitely extendable with the webhooks. Incident-, Problem- and Change Management come out of the box, just add Insight for JIRA and you get a full Configuration Management and Request Fulfilment solution

Cons

Hard to write own addons, internal API could be documented better. For more complex portal ages you will need addons. Integration with Statuspage only for the cloud edition