Servicedesk custom notifications and actions

[Sysad]

Hi Community, am stuck with a weird issue not sure how to tackle I would really appreciate any inputs/thoughts

We have a service desk where tickets get created via API and the ticket will carry all fields including customer name and email id in two different text fields.

The project has a workflow and, in a transition, called "ABC Ready", we send out a custom email to the customer using JWT Send Email post function.

Addon JWT Send email post function has an ability to use a different email address as FROM rather than the outgoing email used in JIRA's outgoing email settings. 

Now when the customer receives the email, the customer will reply, and the reply should sit in associated tickets comments. The outgoing email to customers will carry the ticket key in the email subject and when the customer replies, based on a key in subject Jira will process the email and adds a comment. This is the desired function

However, in our case customer email in the ticket is never a part of the service desk and we waited few days thinking users are not responding, but got to know that users are in fact responding and comments are not captured and email replies are in a void.

The FROM email which is different from Jira's outgoing email is via AWS SES without inbox.

After giving a thought, we understood that customer is not part of service desk, in fact not a Jira user hence no association to any ticket and emails will not be processed.

To mitigate this we have manually added customers to Servicedesk and in transition "ABC Ready" we are copying customer email id to request participants. And in inbound email settings, we added the FROM email id to "Create an issue or add a comment" with forward email address to catch unprocessed emails and added the same FROM email id to service desk to create an email ticket.

Also modified customer permissions to:
1-Anyone can email the service desk or raise a request in the portal
2-Any customer, by typing an email address

After doing this we are seeing customer comments coming in and started adding missing customers to customers section in the service desk.

Now replies to emails are inconsistent meaning if john is a customer for 10 tickets, john's replies are populating only 4 or 5 issues and rest aren't. Sometimes we even see in catch email inbox saying the user doesn't have access to project, but the user is part of customers as well as a participant to the given ticket and weirdly there are few tickets with the same error in catch email but comments are posted.

Not sure how to achieve consistency in posting comments when a customer replies to email. How should customers be managed? What settings or how can we redo it to keep it all coming in?

Thanks in advance

[Brant Schroeder]

Is there a reason you are not using delivered functionality and using the JWT plugin?  Are you creating custom messages for different users or is there just a single message that goes out?

[Sysad]

Hi @Brant Schroeder thank you for considering my question

1. All users will get the similar email, however, the email body and key in the subject will change.

Subject: Your reported defect XY-1234 is Ready for next steps

Body:

Defect Number: XY-1234

Created on: ddmmyy

and some Other fields

To share feedback please reply to this email

2. Am not sure what is a delivered functionality and with JWT, can you please dumb it down? and how can that help?

Thanks

[Brant Schroeder]

Just a quick follow-up to make sure I understand everything.  You create the issue in your service desk using the API.  An email is sent on issue create by Jira Service Desk.  The reply email comes from a different email then your Jira mail handler email or the email used on the service desk. 

Why are you not using the service desks email when you reply?

Have you updated the email address on the project notifications to match the service desk email and just used the delivered response and not JWT? (This is done by going to project settings > notifications and then updating the email listed there.)

What benefit are you getting from using the Jira Workflow Toolbox response over the delivered response?

[Sysad]

After API ticket creation customers will get 3  custom notifications using the plugin (Created, Ready for Testing, Resolved) and we don't want to use the Jira email template because those emails will have links to view issues and we don't want customers to come into Jira to view, moreover customer will not be added as a Jira user. We are behind VPN and all customers cannot access portals.

Customer email is captured to a custom field in Jira and the notification scheme will not take the email from the custom-field hence using the plugin

Created custom notification is sent via Jira default SMTP 

Ready for testing is sent from a custom email that is different from Jira SMTP using the plugin. When the ticket goes into this status, I’m copying the customer email address to request participants and by doing this customer footprint on their ticket will be established. By adding them as participants, they will get notified saying someone added them as participants and based on their access to VPN they can log in to Servicedesk portals and view all tickets where they are participants and for customers who don't have vpn, they will get custom email notify only. Apart from being added to participants, I’m bulk uploading customers to Servicedesk customers role manually every week or so and I see only 2-3 new email ids often

Resolved is sent from a custom email which is different from jira SMTP using the plugin

For resolved and testing, customers will reply and reply should be added as a ticket comment. Above mentioned steps are working fine but intermittently and to solve this I have added all customers to a group and that group to permission scheme to add comments.

Once the customer is added as a customer to portal or as a participant to issue, they get the notification and from that they are logging into portal by setting a password.

For now, things are working. But to make everything simple and smooth and also by not adding users to jira, is there any other way?

I hope I made some sense.