Tutorial: using Confluence and Jira Service Management together

Integrate Confluence and Jira Service Management

Any Support or IT team will tell you that software doesn’t always behave as you think it would. Part of being an excellent IT Manager or Support Engineer is knowing all the edge cases that aren’t necessarily written in the product documentation – the tricks of the trade, go-to answers, common issues, and workarounds that resolve issues that otherwise seem complex.

But what if you could capture the knowledge your veterans have accumulated over the years? The Confluence knowledge base integration for Jira Service Management does just that. The Confluence knowledge base gives your team a place to centralize and organize all customer-facing (or employee-facing) FAQs and documentation, and a private workspace where your team can share best practices and institutional knowledge. That way, no one ever starts from scratch; everyone is equipped with insights from past work, and customers receive standardized answers that the whole team has reviewed.

Once you link your service desk project to a knowledge base, the articles you publish in the knowledge base will automatically display in your service desk's knowledge base. This improves your customer experience by surfacing answers more quickly and, in some cases, without ever having to ask for help. Everyone with view access to your service desk can view articles (pages) you publish without a Confluence license. You only need Confluence licenses for team members who create and update articles.

To create a page that’s visible to only your team, just use Confluence page permissions to restrict internal articles to only your team members. Restricted pages won't appear in the help center, but your team can reference them while they work on issues. To learn more about knowledge base access and permissions, read this documentation.

To create your team’s new knowledge base and link it to your service desk project:

1. From your service desk project, go to Project settings > Knowledge base.
2. Choose Link to a Confluence space. You can link a space to a service desk project if Confluence and Jira Service Management have the same Atlassian Cloud domain name. You can also unlink or change Confluence spaces whenever you like.
3. From the application dropdown, select the Confluence site you want to link to.
4. Select the space name or choose Create a knowledge base space. If you create a new knowledge space, name the space.
5. Tap Next.

Add knowledge base articles to Confluence

Next, it’s time to add articles to your knowledge base to help customers help themselves. Start by creating documentation that answers the most common FAQs. If you’re on the front lines fielding questions every day, you probably don’t even need to look at support issues to know what questions come up the most often. Start there.

Luckily, your knowledge base comes equipped with everything you need to get started, including article templates, and a pre-configured overview page with the livesearch and content by label macros. As you’re making your first article, these few tips and tricks will help you get started on the right foot:

1. Standardize your content with templates: Use the how-to and troubleshooting article templates to standardize the look and feel of your articles and make the process of creating new knowledge base articles super simple for your Service Desk agents. Don’t forget, templates are completely customizable! So you can set up the template with all your organization’s standard information and brand formatting and let your agents take it from there. The more guidance and structure you can put in your template, the faster your team can create great articles.
2. Customize the look and feel of your space: Simple changes like a space logo and welcome message can make a huge difference in your customer’s experience and ensure consistency in your organization’s brand image. To learn more about customizing the space logo, color scheme, and theme of your Confluence pages, check out this documentation.
3. Proactively display known issues: Use the Jira Issues macro to provide a link to any known issues that relate to the article. The macro provides real-time status updates, which keeps the customer up-to-date and cuts down on duplicate tickets.
4. Label and organize your content: Although there is a keyword search functionality in Confluence, using Confluence labels will make it easier to find information. You can use the Confluence content by label macro to organize content and map your service desk requests to specific labels to highlight the most relevant content. While this might seem tedious, it will help you scale operations as your knowledge base grows.
5. Integrate knowledge management into your support or IT workflow: Oftentimes, important information is shared within service desk issues, but it gets lost in the shuffle. With the knowledge base integration, your team can capture and document valuable information without interrupting their flow – in one click, agents can create a new article directly from a service desk issue. See below for more detailed instructions.

Find more in-depth best practices for self-service knowledge bases here.

Keep improving your customer service with knowledge base insights

Now that you’ve created your knowledge base, it’s time to learn what content is working best. Gathering customer feedback is essential for improving your content and- everyone’s favorite!- deflecting more tickets.

Capturing customer feedback

The simplest way to get customer feedback is by including a quick survey at the end of each knowledge base article. The thumbs up and down icon functionality make it easy to get a quick pulse on customer sentiment.

Looking for even more feedback? The Forms for Confluence app allows you to create custom surveys and store responses directly in your Confluence internal database. Or, you can open up the line of communication with your customers by allowing licensed users (or anonymous users) to comment on knowledge base articles. This is a simple way to connect with your end-users and use feedback to improve your content over time.

Knowledge base reporting

If you’re looking for quantitative data to prove the success of your shiny new knowledge base, look no further than the deflected and resolved request insight reports.