By training your internal customers to come to Jira Service Management to report issues and request help, you can help them help others more efficiently.
Your IT team is always ready to lend a hand, but chances are, they’d prefer not to be interrupted with drive-by questions all day, every day. Training your internal customers to come to Jira Service Management to report issues and request help goes a long way toward making sure your IT team isn’t interrupted with drive-by questions all day.
For this reason and so many more, if you haven’t created a knowledge base yet, the time is now.
Whether you have an existing knowledge base or you’re about to create your first, it’s always good to begin with the basics, starting with the dynamic relationship between Jira Service Management and its BFF, Confluence. If you don’t have Confluence yet, keep reading to learn why it might be the secret ingredient to your team’s success.
Alright, let’s start deflecting some tickets, shall we?
Step 1: start a knowledge base with one click
Create a knowledge base space in Confluence and link it to your service desk right from Jira Service Management. With one click in the configuration menu (that little “cog” icon in the top-right corner), you can create a new knowledge base space in Confluence where your agents can add self-help documentation.
We know many of you would love to try self-service with Confluence, but may hold back because of pricing. Good news: you can enjoy a free trail of Confluence as a knowledge base for up to 10 users or 3 agents. You’ll only pay for users who author content, so there are no blockers between your team and self-service.
Step 2: create knowledge base articles directly from JSM
Your service desk agents probably already know what the most frequently asked questions are, so start by answering those with self-help documentation. I also recommend searching through Jira Service Desk to find the most commonly raised requests and/or issue types. Let the data you already have be your guide.
Begin with the easiest, low-hanging fruit. Your service desk agents probably already know what the most frequently asked questions are, so start by addressing those with self-help documentation. Support documentation is automatically embedded into IT workflows, and agents can reference and write knowledge base articles from their service desk. When it comes to creating documentation, we recommend searching through Jira Service Management to find the most commonly raised requests and issue types. Let the data you already have be your guide.
If you’re not sure whether you’ve provided the right amount of information, ask a colleague from outside the IT team to read through the article. See if they’re able to complete the task without getting blocked by missing info (or confused by too much). If not, revisit your knowledge base and update the steps per your colleague’s feedback.
Step 3: recommend knowledge base articles in your service portal
Okay, this isn’t really a step, because Jira Service Management does it for you.
Together, Confluence and Jira Service Management seamlessly integrate to save your team time and improve your customers’ experience by surfacing the information your customers or employees need to resolve their issue fast.
The Confluence knowledge base is a place for your team to organize all customer-facing (or employee-facing) FAQs and documentation. It’s also a private, collaborative workspace where your team can share best practices and institutional knowledge.
Once you’ve connected your knowledge base, customers will automatically see recommended articles as they type their requests into Jira Service Management. No need to re-train them to go into Confluence looking for knowledge base articles; they just head to your service desk portal, as they do now, and start typing. The integrated knowledge base intelligently recommends the right service and learns from every interaction, so answers are easy to find.
Step 4: view knowledge base articles in Jira Service Management
Once customers find a relevant solution, they can read it right from Jira Service Management. The process is fast and intuitive for customers, and preempts common requests before they’re even submitted.
Step 5: keep improving your customer service with knowledge base insights
Now that you’ve made it a snap for customers to find answers, you’ll learn just how helpful those answers are.
Check out deflected and resolved request insight reports and understand how your audience is responding to your knowledge base articles. You can select a day on the graph to see more details about how knowledge articles were used on that date.
There are also thumbs-up and -down icons, so your customers can easily indicate whether they found the articles helpful. Your team can learn from the articles that deflect requests and make improvements to other knowledge base content.
A knowledge base with Jira Service Management and Confluence is your team’s one-stop shop for service requests, incident management, SLAs, and, of course, knowledge management. Click below to get started!