Illustaration of a person frantically trying to be productive at work.

Pings, tickets, emails, all asking for an immediate response — Jira Service Desk agents know this feeling better than anyone. And when you’re always in a rush, it’s hard to know what to prioritize or what behaviors to change in order to defeat that mile-long to-do list. To combat this conundrum, we took a closer look at team efficiency by interviewing teams of Jira Service Desk agents and admins. We came away with three core areas (automation, additional features, and customer interactions) where apps could improve agent productivity, freeing up the experts to focus on what they do best – solving customer problems.

According to a recently published report from Platinum Top Vendor Adaptavist on the future of automation, 36% of the 500 workers they interviewed are spending two to four hours of their day on manual tasks – we think that’s way too much tedious work. We know you don’t enjoy spending that much time copying and pasting, so let’s look at our three core areas to see where apps can help cut back the number of hours agents are spending on manual work.

Image showing 36% of 500 workers are spending between 2-4 hours a day on manual tasks

Automation

As Adaptavist’s numbers show, today’s workstreams still involve a lot of manual tasks. Turning to automation apps can be an easy win for your team to save time with the tasks that you repeat day after day. It can add value to your workflow in many ways by following a simple pattern: trigger, condition, action. For example, here are a few simple automation actions that can save your team lots of time:

  • Closing an epic if all issues in that epic are closed
  • Deleting duplicates
  • Creating recurring tasks (like reports)
  • Creating a personalized auto-reply
  • Changing an issue status once assigned
  • Auto-assigning users (or a balanced round-robin group)

Think about which tasks you don’t need to be doing every day. Get creative!

Additional features

Some agents might benefit from a few additional features to better personalize Jira Service Desk to their workflows, while others may not. According to our interviews with customers, these are the three most common additional features used to personalize their workflows:

Queue management

Each agent operates differently, and customizing issues via sorting and filtering can be a huge time suck. Apps with flexible queue sorting allow agents to view issues in the order they prefer and identify their priorities more efficiently. For example, agents can:

  • Sort issues across projects
  • Import queues from other projects
  • Group queues together
  • Create customized queue list views
  • Hide queues they are no longer using
  • Filter issues by keywords

These are just a few of the functionalities that can help your team work smarter and save time when sorting and managing issues.

Custom fields

Jira Service Desk agents have the ability to customize several fields for cloud deployment, but sometimes, when creating a new workflow for a team, they need to customize a field that isn’t available and are forced to create a workaround. This is where Marketplace comes to the rescue, offering apps with custom fields for agents to get the information they need. Fields that are customizable using the Marketplace app Profields include status, priority, lists, numeric values, dates, text, and more!

Dynamic fields and forms

Lastly, if you need to capture specific information and don’t want to manage several custom fields, try adding a customizable form to help you capture the information you need the first time around. Together with dynamic fields, you can contextually surface questions depending on a customer’s prior response. For example, dynamic forms can take the customer through a built-out flow that can hide or display sections depending on how a customer responds to the form. This allows agents to capture only the necessary information, and helps customers save time filling out sections of forms that are not relevant to their issue.

Improved customer interactions

Jira Service Desk agents are constantly being pulled in multiple directions, often at the intersection of customer needs and internal demands. There are a few easy ways to cut down on some of the tedious aspects of interacting with customers to increase agent productivity and respond to customers more quickly.

Template responses

If you are an agent or an admin, take a moment to think about that one response you’ve typed out over and over again. Are you looking forward to responding that question again?

Probably not. Save yourself the trouble by creating a template, so the next time the question comes up, you can select a pre-written response and avoid rewriting the same information every time you get a commonly asked question. Here’s an example from Canned Responses Pro.

Chat and video

In cases where you want to convey a highly detailed response that would be too time-consuming to type out, try a screen recorder, which allows you to create a short video explaining a problem or solution to your customer. Not only will this feel more personalized for the customer, but you can reuse the videos for similar problems — just like a canned response.

If you think a face-to-face interaction is the best solution and are already using Zoom, connect your Jira Service Desk Cloud to Zoom so you can schedule and start meetings directly from your tickets.

Dispatch emails

Lastly, consider setting up email notifications for internal and external stakeholders who are watching tickets, so they’re informed whenever any action occurs on a ticket. Set up automations with an app such as Email This Issue that will help send out issues in emails without having to switch context to an email client. Allow stakeholders to stay up to date without you having to do any manual work.


There are many different ways apps can benefit your team. There are apps for each of the use cases discussed, and many more available on the Atlassian Marketplace. We understand that work never stops for agents and admins of Jira Service Desk, but spending time now on automation strategy can spare your team lots of headaches in the long run. Try one of these Marketplace apps free for 30 days and see for yourself how your team can increase agent productivity and cut down time spent on manual tasks.

How apps can improve Jira Service Desk Cloud agent productivity