The Ecosystem Marketing team is writing a blog about partners providing exceptional customer support for apps. As you know, a great customer experience is a huge driver for positive reviews and retention - and it’s a way to differentiate your solution in the Marketplace.
If you have advice or a favorite template or tool, or just want to share an experience, we’d love to hear from you and potentially feature your quote on the Developer Blog.
Here are a few questions to get some thoughts going:
What templates and solutions do you recommend for providing support to customers?
What resources, tools, or events have been helpful to you as a team for providing support?
For example, a few partners have told us about the importance of designing a clear and valid service catalog with simple copy for the service portal, as well as using Confluence to build a robust knowledge base.
If you are open for a brief chat or have something to share, please drop a comment below.
Thanks so much for helping us get advice out to the developer community!
Being an Atlassian partner and a vendor, no suprise we use JSM for hanlding customer support requests.
We use JSM widgets to help customers to get in contact with us in many places - marketplace listing, our Confluence documentation wiki and app marketing websites.
We feel that making the contacts to get support as visible as possible helps us to build trust and confidence.
Of course, customers could get in contact with us right from the app, if they need to.
We try to engage customers to share their needs and requirements which helps us to shape our app developement plans.
When answering, we usually provide a screencast, a short video illustrating a possible solution
and in many cases share the storage format of the page for the solution
(we find this is the easiest way to share the configuration, but sometimes it is a bit overwhelming for not very technical people).
Using JSM helps us to manage communication around app releases and ensure customers get updated on the progress we do.
And very often a successfully answered support request ends up in our documentation wiki, adding to examples and tutorials.
Feel free to send PM and happy to discuss and share more details
This is Onder from the Appfire team. So, my answer does contain some Appfire apps as well as other apps from the marketplace. Also, I am giving my personal take and it may not reflect my employer’s view. I think this is enough of a disclaimer
Let’s break down the support process into three buckets or sub-process: Taking a request, processing it and responding to the customer.
Taking: Both style and substance do matter. So, having a well-defined service catalogue is a must. Asking for just enough information is essential to avoid customers’ labour bias. Also, giving rich forms would boost the UX. The existing theme and customisation options by JSM are OK, but for the best result, my fav app is Refined. You can create an amazing portal experience by using that app. If your customers do prefer a real-time conversational style support experience, then Chat for JSM is just brilliant. By using that app, you can spin up another channel for your business on top of JSM. It is fully integrated with JSM, so the agents do not have to do a context switch.
Processing: This is the meaty part. Completing any ticket based on the designated timeframe is vital. If you are looking for a solution that works on both JSM and Jira Software, then the obvious solution is Time to SLA. You can define, track and report on your SLA contracts without too much effort. Some support requests do require approvals. JSM provides built-in templates that come with approvals. However, if you need more, Herzum Approval from the marketplace would be really useful. Also, to employ strategy-based issue assignments, I’d use Enhancer Plugin for Jira.
Responding: Regarding the automation and providing streamlined responses to the customers, built-in JSM automation functionality is fantastic and does the job for the majority of the use cases. Having said that, if you are looking for a solution to replace agents’ copy/paste texts from various sources, including notepad apps and even Confluence pages, Canned Responses Pro Templates for Jira is the answer for agent productivity. It is used for creating reusable response content. You can even add automated actions, such as progressing tickets into certain statuses.
just like @sash011 , yasoon is an Atlassian Marketplace partner. We use JSM for our customer support and are very happy with it. Many of our positive reviews refer to customer’s satisfaction with our support. These are a few of our support habits, resources, tools, events:
Our customer portal is easy to find and to access (we link it in our Marketplace app listings, in the app itself, on our website, and in our app documentation)
We are keeping a close eye to our SLAs; time to first response and time to resolution is very important for us
We work with a Jira automation rule to automatically ask for feedback after a solution was proposed
Individual contact via MS Teams calls, screensharing, and so on helps a lot to solve any problems
We constantly update our documentation (Confluence + Scroll Viewport by k15t) with tutorials, videos and further information.
Product feedback and feature requirements by our customers influence our roadmap significantly
We work with our own app (Microsoft 365 for Jira). We chat and triage tickets via Microsoft Teams in JSM (if you want to learn more, here’s a video of our internal use case). Conversational ticketing and the corresponding time savings are a huge benefit for our support team.
So, just a few quick draft of our set-up but I hope it gives you an idea how we work with JSM in customer support.
We from Communardo (Atlassian Marketplace) would also be happy to share our thoughts in a chat. Feel free to reach out or let me know if you prefer a write-up.
We are using the Canned Responses Pro Templates for Jira too! It makes life easier for our support team by having the steps to get the logs easily inserted as a template.
Automation for Jira is very useful too. We use it to automate some stuff like sending a gentle reminder to a customer on an outstanding ticket and populating the email domain of the reporter.
The best part of being a Marketplace Partner is we are empowered to build what need. We built Related Tickets for Jira Service Mgmt using Forge to find related tickets raised by the same reporter. It is just a click away to find related information which helps to improve our level of service to the customer.
This is Laura from K15t. I realize we share a lot of tools and processes with the other teams. In terms of tooling, we mostly rely on JSM (+ a few powerful JSM apps) for managing tickets and on our own Scroll apps for publishing and maintaining our documentation on a public help center. Here some of the more interesting aspects:
We use the JSM ‘label’ field to categorize tickets. Labels help all support agents understand the status of a ticket right from the queue (e.g. requires further investigation, is on hold). We’ve also set up some automations to change the workflow status of a ticket depending on the label we’ve assigned.
Similar to others here we use Canned Responses to organize some frequently shared answers. While our canned responses are usually just a canvas for a reply, it still saves us time and also allows us to share knowledge amongst the team.
The best knowledge sharing tool we have is definitely our public help center. It’s the single source of truth for all product knowledge and ensures that no information is lost within support tickets or in back and forth between support agents. The help center is powered by Scroll Viewport. I see some others here use the app as well.
Customers often create more than one support ticket throughout the customer lifecycle. To keep a good overview and always get the full context when we interact with them, we’ve built a lightweight CRM inside of Confluence with the help of our app Orderly Databases. Each customer is basically on entry/page and all interactions and support tickets they have ever opened are collected in one view.
If we create Jira issues out of support tickets, we make sure that users can easily track our progress. We use our own app Backbone Issue Sync to sync internal issues to our public Jira project, from where users can vote, comment and watch the issue.
As I said, these are just a few of our processes. Hope it helped!
I am Lauma from eazyBI team. This is a very close topic for our company as we work with a strong customer-oriented attitude.
eazyBI is a data analysis tool, and we like the data-driven approach also in customer support. It helps us ensure that each customer interaction is meaningful - not only for the customer but also for our team and the tool roadmap.
In our everyday customer support, we use Jira, Confluence, Scroll Viewport, and HelpScout. We collect data from all those tools and analyze them with eazyBI.
In addition to standard customer support KPIs (reaction time, closed conversations, comparison with previous periods, etc.), we look at trends and prioritize the development backlog, making product development decisions based on customer conversation analysis in eazyBI.
Also, looking from the other side, we aim for proactive communication with customers once we finalize a feature.
Finally, we analyze the documentation, for example, to ensure the most visited pages are always up to date.
If you are interested in more details or some screenshots for the blog post, feel free to contact me. I will be happy to share more on what data we explore during the issue life cycle before and after the development.
Hi @ParkeHunter,
We would love to participate too! Our customer support team gets great reviews and customers love them <3 (which is actually remarkable knowing the fact that our team is french XD). Of course, we’re using JSM, Jira, and Confluence along with our own apps that allow us to be extremely efficient and have amazing reviews
Hi @ParkeHunter Revyz is relatively new in the Atlassian Marketplace ecosystem (4 months in), it was very easy for us to get started in setting up our customer support processes and of course not mention being cost effective.
The software stack we are using is:
Jira Service Management
Confluence
Scroll ViewPort (K15t)
The JSM widget is pretty nifty in embedding it in various places. We are now exploring integrating chat into our support processes.
I have also shared the above template with a couple of other startups given how easy it is to get started.
As we grow some additional ideas from previous experiences that I would like to incorporate in with support systems is product usage analytics & customer engagement tools like a Pendo / Gainsight.
I’m a Support Engineer at Easy Agile, supporting our customers with Jira apps across Cloud, Data Center and Server.
We’re also deep in Atlassian tooling so that we can be immersed in what our customers use. We use Jira Service Management, link issues to our projects in Jira Software, and build our docs in Confluence. We’re also using K15t’s Scroll Viewport — and I can see why it’s popular.
We’ve added Canned Responses to add common snippets like greeting, troubleshooting steps and follow-ups. We’ve got more complicated templates and internal-facing guidance in Confluence, but adding snippets directly to a reply in JSM makes it easy to be consistent and courteous every time.
Especially since we’re based in Australia and almost never in the same time zone as our customers, Calendly has been super helpful for asking customers to meet over Zoom for complicated cases.
My current experiment is adding automation rules in JSM to suggest first steps for support agents based on the type of request. Automation is helping find relevant existing features on our backlog with a JQL search and suggest a response template, and I’m hoping this will streamline onboarding in the support team.
I’m Margaux I am Manager Customer Experience at 55 Degrees
We use JSD to receive and handle all types of requests from customers from bugs to feature requests.
We have a support portal created thanks to Refined (another Atlassian Vendor) which allow us to have once centralise platform for the customers to reach out to us, find our documentation, troubleshooting pages… All our documentation is actually in Confluence but displayed in a nicer way via Refined.
Using Jira helps us track SLA, comments and satisfactions from our customers. When we close a ticket, they receive a quick survey to rate us from 1 to 5 stars and the option to add a comment. We have been really happy to see that we are getting more and more people answering the survey with only 5 stars.
When exchanging messages through JSD is not enough, we have a call through either Teams and Zoom which allow us to solve the issue faster and engage with the user.
Feel free to reach out to me at margaux@55degrees.se, I would love to help if I can
We use our own service desk (Hipporello Service Desk) for service desk features to bring customer inquiries, bug reports and other support requests to Trello. It is the JSD alternative for Trello users. We connect our support emails to Hipporello Service Desk, use portal provided to list our forms and embed forms like Contact Us to our website.
For live support we use Crisp. We love this tool and when it is compared to others, it is quite cheap. Magic Browse capability is great and also several integration allow us to integrate with our central tools like Slack.
In order to meet our customers, we use Google Meet.
We provide 24/7 support and respond to all requests within minutes-hours with screencasts where needed. We typically fix any bugs same day and also aim to deploy any feature requests same day.
It shocks customers because they’re so used to dealing with the slow support from the Atlassian behemoth and over-staffed marketplace vendors.
Ironically the key is to not have a dedicated support team and instead have developers handle support.
I’m Fede Baronti, DEISER’s Customer Support Specialist for our apps (Projectrak and Exporter).
It’s been almost 5 years since I started working with JSM and other apps from the Atlassian Marketplace, and due to our continual improvement nature, we are always looking forward to trying out new apps and gadgets that will help us improve our Customer Support.
JSM and Confluence are a solid team.
We use Refined for our Support Portal (hey Raj!). Scroll Viewport and Scroll Versions for our documentation and knowledge base help us a great deal, too.
When it comes to Support Backups and On-calls we use our own Projectrak, that allows us to gather all the necessary information about dates, assignees, and history with Support tickets during that time.
Automation rules help us tidy up our queues in many levels, and canned responses also come in handy.
We use Teams for our calls with customers when needed and its integrations with Jira are really useful to keep everyone posted.
It’s nice to see many familiar names and that we think alike on different solutions for our Customer Support.
If you have any more questions or need help, I’d be glad to have a chat anytime!
Fede.
We at META-INF don’t believe in over using templates and general practices for supporting our customers. Every question, every customer and issue is unique and needs a unique and different approach. Our vision for support is a relaxed, intuitive and creative atmosphere, where every customer can leave with a positive and constructive experience. We believe that a well adjusted and happy support agent can make a real difference, so we pay special attention to our teams well being.
In order to support our customers the best we can, we bring customer details, license details and customer loyalty via sales history into the context of the support requests.To achieve this the most effectively, we have create an integration between the Atlassian Marketplace and Jira Service Management. This is an app called Marketplace Integration for Jira (or MARI for short).
The app loads the above mentioned data from the Marketplace into the issue view using the entitlement number the customers provide.This helps our support agents better understand the customer and their requests. This contributes to improving the customer experience, hence the reputation of our products.
The app is freely accessible for all Marketplace Partners, and a brief documentation is also available.
Hey everyone,
This is Elitsa and I work for Nemetschek Bulgaria.
As a proud Gold Solution Partners, of course, we use JSM for handling customer support requests. Our documentation is in Confluence, we track development in Jira, …, the full Atlassian stack.
Providing support to our customers, we are dedicated to delivering the highest quality support services. Our belief is that one of the keys to building strong relationships with our customers is to provide them with exceptional support every step of the way.
Over the years, some of our clients have expressed a desire to see a more detailed breakdown of the support services we provide.
They wanted to have a clear understanding of the time it takes to respond to and resolve their requests, and to be able to present this information in a way that is easily shareable with people outside our portal.
We created a simple solution that allowed administrators to choose which fields they wanted to display on the portal, and also the option to export this information.
Providing them Advanced Portal Reports as an additional add-on to Jira Service Management, they can now follow Logged Work, track SLAs like: Time to first response and Time to resolution and export their reports.
This proved to be a big hit with our customers, who loved the increased transparency and accessibility.
