Jira Help Desk for multiple customers

[Sandor Kocsis]

Hi all. Let’s say I’m providing IT support for my clients, and want to use Jira HD services to handle their incoming issues. There is a group of agents behind, supporting all clients. These agents are my own people, the clients do not have internal IT people at all. What is the recommended setup, do I need to register multiple accounts for my clients, or is there a way to build a single Help Desk instance to serve multiple clients? Am I btw allowed to use Jira Help Desk to connect my clients to - from their perspective - outsourced ITHD agents?

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

@Sandor Kocsis, for sure JSD can work for you given your question. There are two approaches, well three but I certainly would not recommend the third. I have listed the three in order of my recommendation. 

1. Single Help Center with single project. When to use: If your agents are the same or mostly the same for all clients, if the request types are the same or largely the same for the clients, you want to simplify things for your agents. To prevent clients from being able to see issues reported by other clients use the Organizations feature to group you customers and allow for client differentiations in your reporting.
2. Single Help Center with a project per client. When to use: If your agents are different or mostly different for each client, if the request types are different or largely different for each client, you want to keep your agents work separate, I.e. client by client., when you want to have unique request types per client so they aren’t confused by request types that don’t apply to them. To prevent clients from being able to see issues reported by other clients simply ensure that the Customers defined in each project only has the clients associated with the project. Arguably provide cleaner reporting separation but #1 can achieve this as well by using Organization in filters for reports.
3. Help Center per client. This is unnecessary and not recommended. This is done by creating separate installation of JSD with different URLs. If the same agents are working all instances that means you are paying 2x, 3x,... for your solution and they are completely separate.

hope this helps. I would also recommend you got to support.atlassian.com, choose JSD and search the documentation/knowledge base for more discussion on the topics I presented above if interested.

[Jerry Ryan Ishmael]

I would also like to add to @Jack Brickey 's response that with option #2 you can later add your client as agents and train them to utilize the helpdesk for their own internal needs and processes if need be down the road. 

But, looks like you just need to stick with #1 to start.

Cheers!

[Sandor Kocsis]

Thanks guys!

[Al]

With regards to #2, as mentioned, this has complete project segregation which may simplify the reporting and does ensure no client sees another (e.g. for customer audit).  

I use approach #2, mainly because multiple projects were setup before the Organization feature was implemented.   All customers have same issue / request types so I use Scriptrunner built-in script to create new project from template. I created Jira Dashboard(s) to give a front-end view across all service desks which has the benefit of giving same view to jira users and service desk agents. 

If "Organization" was available when I started, I would have probably used #1 approach.   The concern I have to consider switching now, is around traceability of a all raised issues, i.e. all issues would have to move to the common project and therefore change issue key.  This would have to be carefully managed with client.

Any suggestions of how best to migrate from #2 to #1 would of course be welcomed.

Thanks