When using Jira Service Management to manage your team's service desk, it's extremely important to ensure that your end-users have a good experience. Otherwise, they may become frustrated with the tool and stop using it to submit requests. With the broad range of clients we serve at Praecipio Consulting, we've found one of the biggest keys to a successful service desk is clearly setting customer expectations and meeting those expectations consistently. Jira Service Management comes with Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) that teams can use to set those expectations and give customers transparency around them. It's important to set reasonable goals for your SLAs, and with automation you can make it easier for your agents to stay on top of those goals so your customers are satisfied.

Here's how:

Automate alerts to agents when SLAs are about to be breached

For your SLAs, it's important to be consistent with meeting the expected goals assigned to them. This allows your agents to build trust with customers and encourages customers to continuously use the service desk for their requests. With automation, agents can be alerted when time is running out on an SLA. For the automation rule, there's a trigger titled "SLA Threshold Breached" that works perfectly in this scenario. This trigger allows you to set when an alert should send to the assignee of the request based on how much time is left on the particular SLA. The assignee is then made aware that they need to make progress on the issue and can stay on top of the SLA goal. This, in turn, leads to a happier customer and an increased sense of trust in your agents. 

Automate alerts to customers if a ticket is pending their response 

It's good practice in a service desk to configure so that if a ticket is pending a response from the customer, a "Waiting for Customer SLA" is set to give them time to respond. If the time passes on that SLA (we don't receive a response from the customer after a certain amount of days), the ticket is automatically resolved. Before we automate this though, it can be helpful to send out an alert to the customer to remind them that the ticket is waiting on their response. I've seen customers become frustrated when a ticket is resolved without alerting them that it was waiting on their response, as they simply forgot about their pending request. Sending out reminders sets clear expectations with the customer that the ticket has not made further progress due to inaction on their end and gives them the chance to interact with the request before it's automatically resolved. Other times, you may not receive a response from the customer because they no longer need your assistance. In these situations, the automation to resolve tickets pending customer action after the "Waiting for Customer SLA" is breached can save your agents time and effort, as they don't have to keep track of the time pending a customer response and manually resolve the ticket themselves.

We've seen so many clients reap the benefits of using automation to help their teams stay on top of their SLAs. Not only does it build trust with customers and in your organization; it also fortifies your service desk and improves your the experiences of your end users and agents! If you need help with SLAs, or anything else Atlassian, reach out and one of our experts will contact you ASAP!