Several months ago, our team completed a complex but interesting project for one retail company from Russia. This company was extensively using Jira Service Desk as a helpdesk platform to handle incoming requests from their customers. However, they faced some challenges while working with this customer support software:
- Their customers had to submit tickets by email or through the customer portal which did not allow our client to collect real problems as quite many users just did not reach them, and as a consequence stopped using their online shop.
- The support team wanted to find a more efficient way to interact with their customers because emails and ticketing have not been as effective as they expected.
Keeping these issues in mind, we started working on the possible solutions that can address the problems of this retail company and increase the loyalty of customers.
Today, we would like to share our experience with creating a new app that helped our client to integrate Jira Service Desk with the most popular messengers. If you want to beta test this plugin, please, fill out the short survey below.
Planning the solution
Our team had a lot of hypotheses and assumptions we needed either to prove or reject. Additionally, the customer already had some ideas and possible solutions through which we had to select only the ones that would work for sure.
After running a series of surveys, customer development sessions, and interviews, we collected all the feedback and started designing our solution. During this stage we also validated everything with future users and existing customers to ensure that our concept would actually make it to the roadmap.
The scope of problems included the following:
- Additional difficulty to contact the support team through existing communication channels.
- Smartphone was not the best gadget to contact the support team.
Moreover, the company wanted to increase the loyalty of their customers by tailoring the online retail shop experience to customers’ needs.
Designing the solution
After a series of workshops and meetings, we have elaborated a single vision of the solution that should be created.
Our customer wanted to integrate Jira Service Desk with popular messengers. We decided to split integration into two phases. The first phase added support for Telegram and Facebook, the second should bring Viber and WhatsApp into action.
We engineered and developed the app which allows you to integrate Jira Service Desk with one or multiple messengers. Within the corresponding project there appears an additional section where you can set up integration with the required messenger.
We did our best to simplify the process of integrating Jira with messengers, keeping in mind the specifics of each platform. For example, you just need to register a bot in Telegram and then enter its token for registration. Then you can adjust the operation of this Telegram bot to your needs and customize it to reflect the actual workflow of the associated project.
After integrating the project with the messenger, you can get an overview of all messengers connected to it in the customer channels.
The app also adds the Messengers queue into the list of queues within the project. If you have several messengers, the parent queue will be further divided, so your support agents can easily notice new tickets.
The most interesting part appears in the issue itself. Here we have added the Messengers tab. It shows the entire communication with the customer on the problem. By default, the app pulls the initial request as the issue summary, additionally, it appends the name of the customer and timestamp. The support agent can further edit the summary and update it to reflect the actual problem.
The support agent can quickly communicate with the customer right from the Jira issue. The customer will receive all replies into his messenger. The app creates a virtual account of the customer in Jira Service Desk which is not counted towards the commercial license of Jira.
Improvements in Customer Experience
Customer experience was one of the crucial things we kept in mind while developing this solution for Jira Service Desk.
In case of Telegram messenger we have created a bot which could connect to Jira Service Desk and perform essential operations on issues there. The initial interaction started when the customer adds the bot.
Here the customer just taps Start. Upon this, the bot prompts the user to select the action, as follows:
- Report a new issue
- Update on the existing ticket
- Reopen the closed ticket
The customer can quickly enter the request and submit it to the support team of our customer.
In Jira we have set up a trigger to send an initial response upon the request submission by the customer.
Then the support agent connects to the chat and requests details from the customer. This app allows them easily exchange files with each other if needed.
Now customers can view the list of their own tickets or search for a specific ticket by number. By default, the bot shows the two recent tickets. This number can be increased to five.
Integration with other messengers looks quite similar. The main difference that there are no bots.
Project Results
This project was a tremendously challenging task for us. One of the greatest problems was to design the user experience across multiple messengers that will neatly integrate into existing workflows in Jira Service Desk.
Our team did our best to create the mechanism that will correctly and elegantly handle replies both in the most popular messengers and Jira Server Desk. In case of the Telegram bot, it was not so easy to make it create new tickets and map replies to the corresponding ticket.
Our client got satisfied with the results of the project because the messenger integration for JSD we suggested allowed them to:
- increase the loyalty of their existing and new customers
- decrease the shopping cart abandon rate.
The insights they’ve received using our solution helped them:
- identify several issues during the checkout in some browsers
- boost their sales and revenues without any changes to their marketing or pricing
- deliver the best service to their customers.
This retail company already considers another phase to improve the existing results and introduce new features. We are looking forward to working with them and deliver a robust solution for realtime collaboration with their customers.
We are very interested in hearing how you deal with customer support and get new insights from you. Reach out vrutkevich@stiltsoft.com or fill out the short survey above if you want to beta test this app for Jira Service Desk.