Getting help shouldn't be a difficult task, and that's the idea behind the Atlassian IT Help Desk integration project. In short, we use our own products to dramatically improve the customer experience for end users, while consolidating and automating data flows so that our support team can make better decisions faster.
Why we built a new help desk
Service management easily comes first in terms of basic IT functionality. Every once in a while, IT teams need to re-evaluate their solution to make sure it still works effectively for the organization and its employees. Good solutions need to be efficient, deliverables, and produce measurable results.
Out of absolute necessity, we prioritized our service desk integration projects. Our old methods are now becoming difficult to use. The old solution was built for a much smaller company, when we had fewer services and few employees. In addition, many employees at the time were working in offices, which meant face-to-face support when necessary.
But a lot has changed! The number of services used by Atlassians has exploded. Our central service desk is divided into 14, each managed by a different IT team. Our workforce is constantly expanding, increasing the load on existing systems. Working from home became the norm, which changed the way people interacted and further increased the amount of support they needed. Overall, this is no different from what happens to most companies.
Our biggest fear is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to seek help. Employees work at more than 10 help desks and multiple Slack channels. There are dozens of links and support options, but there aren't enough differences between the options. At some point, employees must know how our IT team works and where to find resources to get help.
We have solved this problem. After months of planning and development, we launched a new help desk in the fall of 2021. It takes some really smart minds to bring it together — collaborative efforts including business systems, human technology, intelligent automation, customer support technology, workplace technology, data engineering, GDPR compliance IT, content platforms, customer accounts and support system interfaces, sales technology, and marketing engineering. But in the end, we have an efficient, effective, and measurable help desk. Most importantly, any company that tries to solve such problems can use it.
Measurable power
The help desk integration program gave us the opportunity to reimagine the experience for our employees and customers, making it easier to get help. In addition, it's an opportunity to re-architect our solutions, leverage modern tools, integrate our platform, and ensure that our IT support is efficient, scalable, and most importantly measurable.
Warren Shubin, an IT operations manager and one of the main contributors to the project, explained that atlassian's second benefit is measurability. "You can't manage what you don't measure," he said. "We centralize the IT metrics of our service desk functions in one place, down to the team and service levels. From the beginning, we knew this was an opportunity to build a system that offered a lot of useful analysis, and we needed a way to look at them, so we developed a reporting dashboard. ”
For reference
In this case, the level refers to our Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 support tiers. Levels 1 provide assortment and basic support with the help of an operating manual, while levels 2 and 3 provide increasing engagement or professional attention.
"Through this dashboard, we can see the amount of support for each service and each support team and each level of support," said Joe Flowers, an engineer and lead contributor. "For example, we can see the number of tickets that level 2 and level 1 handle for a given service," he explains. "Over time, we can expect to see a trend from more requests completed at Level 2 to more requests completed at Level 1 – we've added some features to the ticketing system to help shift work to Level 1."
If we determine that a solution to a problem is repeatable, we can mark it as added to the runbook and then work on it at Level 1 to help our more professional team members focus on the tougher problem.
The reporting dashboard provides a wide range of statistics and graphs, presented visually and digitally. Analytics can be filtered by system, team, issue, and request type.
Our service desk solutions
In the words of Fin Duggan, an IT business analyst and major contributor, Atlassian's new help desk solution is designed to "meet the needs of employees" by providing three different entry points based on how they want to get help. This includes:
- Chat support: Halp running in Slack provides a friendly, accessible chat interface
- Tickets: A powerful, integrated ticketing system built on Jira Service Management.
- Self-help resources: New sign-in pages and extended knowledge base (KB), both hosted in Confluence and integrated into Jira's help desk portal.
In addition to these resources for employees, we've built new tools for IT teams, including a new workbook in Confluence to guide Level 1 agents through problem resolution, and the reporting dashboard mentioned earlier.
The architecture of our service desk solutions
As a result, we reach our customers in three ways – they can start with three different entry points to suit their preferences and needs.
Our Confluence landing page is a curated experience that IT can use to communicate news, highlight common issues and quick solutions, provide tips and reminders about getting support, and link to the Knowledge Base Self-Service Portal.
"If customers only have the URL of the landing page, they'll have everything they need to fix the problem or make a support request elsewhere," says Joe. "One of our new solutions is a self-service knowledge base."
Some customers, especially Atlassian, prefer to work directly in Jira Service Management because of its more intuitive UI. Our Jira Service Management ticket submission page uses predictive automation to help customers define their requests and provide knowledge base articles along the way. We refer to this destination as the Customer Portal. Here, the customer can see the status of the open service request, follow the agent to create a thread and add comments.
Agent View is the command center for our help desk solutions. All support team members can view and manage their queues from the agent view. They can flag tickets for further evaluation, such as suggesting that the issue be documented in the knowledge base or marked as a future Level 1 solution. Jira Service Management also provides a range of data points for reporting and analysis, such as Resolution Time and CSAT. Fin Duggan notes, "This is actually what every customer sees when they use cloud services. We leveraged the product master, and most of the changes occurred in the Jira Service Management template workflow. ”
As an alternative to Jira Service Management, customers can simply go to the Slack channel and open a service request by telling us their issue. "Atlassian has made extensive use of Slack, an approach that puts the portal at your fingertips and requires only familiar and intuitive interaction," Fin says.
We use Halp to enhance this experience. People who have questions to raise just send us a message via the #help-it Slack channel. "Halp is an amazing tool that not only syncs everything that happens in Slack to a Jira ticket, but it's a two-way street that updates the conversations customers see in Slack with everything in the Jira ticket," says Joe. Behind the scenes, we use a private Slack channel for our support team, operating separately from the main customer channel.
Our Level 1 service agent categorizes each message. They can choose self-service articles to forward or send support instructions to users, or move them to level 2 or level 3 if level 1 can't resolve the request directly—all within Halp. Level 2 can work in Slack in their private teams channel or work on issues in Jira Service Management instead.
All related conversations are captured and displayed in the Jira ticket. Of course, users have a thread in Slack to reference, but they also have a link in Jira Service Management that they can link to their tickets, which plays a central role in this solution.
Ryan Hastie, IT Support Manager, notes, "Part of Halp's function is conversational support. If you can help someone in real time, you can speed up the resolution, which is good for both agents and customers because you don't have to wait for answers to questions or deal with time zone issues that delay resolution. ”
In Slack, customers send messages to the #help-it channel to get started. The L1 support agent looks at it, creates a ticket with Halp, and then the support process begins. Customers can solve problems effortlessly.
How to get started
Building a service desk solution like ours is undoubtedly a feat; we're a fairly large company with hundreds of services to support, so a lot of planning is required.
Smaller organizations can (and should!). ) lay the groundwork for its service desk before growing rapidly. For large companies, the blueprint for redevelopment and re-evaluation is at hand. Regardless of the size of your organization, using Atlassian products makes it much easier to get started.