• Article
  • Mar.8.2018

How to engage your customers with Jira live chat support

  • Mar.8.2018
  • Reading time mins

To be blunt, at Valiantys we love Jira Service Desk. We believe providing great customer service is more of an art than a science, which is why Jira Service Desk is flexible enough to meet the needs of different organizations across every industry. Customer satisfaction is produced by finding the right combination of ITIL best practices, experience and knowledge around Jira Service Desk, along with customizing your service to your client base.

Sometimes, this means implementing live chat support is a critical element to your ITSM solution.

Recently we worked with a company in the media industry that needed a better way to chat with their clients. They wanted to use Jira Service Desk as their central ITSM solution, however the main requirement was to provide a live chat feature for customers that could be embedded into any web application used within their organization. Slack was heavily adopted internally, so they inquired if they could have an embedded live chat feature with the ability to raise a ticket in Jira Service Desk from a Slack chat window.

Unfortunately there isn’t an out-of-the-box solution in Jira Service Desk. However with a couple of extra plugins and apps this isn’t a major problem.

The requirements:
1. Leverage the existing Slack application in the organization
2. Embed a live chat system that can be displayed in any internal web application
3. Create tickets in Jira Service Desk from the Slack live chat
4. Update the Jira tickets from the Slack chat

Why Jira Service Desk live chat?

There are primarily four ways you can raise a ticket in Jira Service Desk:

  • Customer Portal (for customers)
  • Email (for customers)
  • Jira (agents can raise a ticket on behalf of customers)
  • API (Raise tickets through programming).

These different options enable the customer to reach out when they need help. The Customer Portal is especially useful as it integrates with Confluence, giving you the power to create a knowledge base for your customers so they can find the answers on their own, thus reducing your agents’ workload.

However, what if you want a more personal interaction with customers? Many organizations have a dedicated phone support so agents can talk directly to customers, but in this case they still do need to raise a ticket on behalf of the customers. Furthermore, many customers feel more comfortable using chat instead of calling. In most cases, a live chat feature is more convenient for the service desk team.

There are cases when Hipchat can be a very good solution, such as if your customers are internal and they have access to the tool. However, it wasn’t the situation for this use case, as customers were external.

When there’s a will, there’s a way. Here’s our solution…

Slack with Chatlio: Embedded chat

We found one amazing plugin called Chatlio. It integrates directly with your existing Slack channel, and provides one code in the form of a widget that can be embedded into any HTML page.

 

 

Setup of Chatlio with Slack

You first need to create an account on the Chatlio website, which will give you the option to configure the embedded chat with one Slack channel.

 

 

You also need to install the Chatlio plugin in Slack for this to work.

Finally, once Chatlio is configured with Slack, you will be able to use the code from the “Widget Install” tab in Chatlio and embed it into any HTML page. The widget has a few options. You can display it on the right bottom corner, as a sidebar or as an inline pop-up window. Choose whatever works best for you.

Using Chatlio

After installation, the users will be able to see the live chat option in the web application if they need to ask for help.

 

 

 

The agents, who are probably monitoring a specific Slack channel dedicated to live chat, will get a notification that a new customer wants to talk.

 

 

As you can see in the screenshot above, the agent will also get some additional details about the customer: their location, the page in the application from where they initiated the chat, the local time, browser information and their email (which they provided before initiating the chat).

The agent will then be able to chat with a customer in a private channel. The customer doesn’t need to create any account in Slack, rather all they need to do is to enter their basic information into the live chat. That’s it.

Now if your agent needs to raise the ticket in Jira Service Desk, they could go to Jira and raise a ticket on behalf of their customer. However this would require opening up another window, so we needed to find another solution to make it seamless for the agents to raise a ticket in Jira.

Slack with Jirio: Create and update tickets in Jira

Jirio is a Slack app that integrates Slack with Jira so agents can create tickets from Jira and also update them from the same chat window. It is pretty impressive!

 

 

After installing the app, you also need to configure it with your Jira instance to create the Jira ticket from the same chat window. All you need to do is use the following command to create a ticket in a specific Jira service ticket.

In the above example, we provide the Project Key, Summary, Description, Impact (Custom field), Urgency (Custom field) and the Reporter. In our instance, fields like Impact, Urgency are required but we can configure Jira in a way so that it is easier for the agent to raise a ticket from Jira.

 

Another amazing feature that you can do right from your Slack chat window is the ability to update the Jira Service Desk ticket. For instance, you can transition the ticket to the next available status and also perform some additional actions like adding attachments or assigning the ticket to someone else.

 

 

The whole solution worked quite well when we tested it and we were very satisfied with the capabilities of both Chatlio and Jirio. This solution has lot of different use cases and it can be further explored if you really need to have a live chat functionality for your service desk. This live chat window can be displayed on your main website, helping your organization to get closer to your customers.

Here is the overview of the solution:

 

Valiantys can configure a live chat solution in Jira for your organization

Feel free to let us know your feedback or questions in the comment section, or get in touch directly below. We would like to know how important live chat functionality is for your customers and if you are also looking to implement something similar in your Jira Service Desk.

 

Contact us!

 

 

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