New Jira Service Management settings toggle: Set default behaviour for transition screen comments

[#1]

This page is a follow-up to this previous Community Post (Changes to transition screen comment behaviour in Jira Service Management).

We have just shipped a new product settings toggle that lets you set the default behaviour for transition screen comments. This allows you to decide whether comments on transition screens are “Respond to customer” or “Internal comment” by default.

The toggle is available in “Product settings” (See short video below).

You can access it by:

• Click on the settings icon on the top right (⚙️)

• Click on “Products”

• Click on “Configuration” under the “Jira Service Management” section

• Update the toggle under the section called “Default comment behavior”

  • Select “Default comments to Reply to customer” to change the behaviour to have transition screens default to external comments

Why we enabled this feature and how we learned from your feedback

We recently upgraded the transition screen across all Jira products. As part of this work, we reviewed the default comment behaviour, which was “Reply to customer”.

After speaking to customers and partners, we received feedback that transition screen comments should always default to internal as external comments could accidentally share sensitive or confidential information with help seekers or customers. Many customers did not like our default settings.

So, we changed the default behaviour for comments on transitions screens from “Reply to customer” to “Internal note”.

We quickly realised this was a mistake.

When we released this change, customers immediately started reaching out to us. They needed transition screen comments to default to customer replies so their agents could close the loop with end users. This new default was leading to agents thinking they were commenting back to end users but the comments were internal.

We knew we had to do something.

We know that some customers want the default to be “Internal note” and others want the default to be “Reply to customer”. So, we figured we’d let you make that call with a toggle that sets the default behaviour for your entire site.

What we’ll do from now on

I really want to make sure we get this right in future.

When we make changes to experiences that impact end users, it can be highly disruptive. So, we are going to be much more careful with changes to the work item view, transition screens, queues and other features that affect your users.

I will make sure we don’t ship changes like this without first soliciting feedback here on Community and providing ample notice so you can either prepare for the change. I’ll continue to post articles on this platform so you are across what’s coming and can provide feedback if anything presents a challenge to your ways of working.

What if you opted to have the behaviour changed manually by our team?

If you signed up, we’ll give you until 30th July to change the toggle to “Reply to customer”. At that point, your instance will apply the behaviour selected by the toggle.

This is a whole month to make the change and, as you can see above, it should only take a couple of minutes to make the change.

If this doesn’t work for you, feel free to share your feedback in the comments or you can contact me by email (jgonsalkorale@atlassian.com).

Thanks to everyone for your patience and your feedback and sorry for the inconvenience this change has caused.

Best regards,

Jehan Gonsalkorale

Principal Product Manager

Jira Service Management

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Great news @Jehan Gonsalkorale , this will surely bring happyness to more than a few people :)

I think it's always a great strategy to provide some kind of toggle or option so that the customer can choose the default behavior. 

While I sure can think of plenty of clients that do want it to default to internal, the other side is also true.

Providing this option is a great middle ground by letting the customer decide their default behavior!

If you plan on extending development on this, it would be even more awesome if this toggle could be something that is decided on screen level. Making it so you can decide for a certain transition that it is default "to customer" and others "internally", that would be the maximum amount of flexibility but I'll take a win when I see one :)

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Thanks @Dirk Ronsmans! Appreciate the kind words. Very happy to help here! 

We won't be able to do this at a screen level as that would be a much larger piece of work, but we are looking at whether we can also do this for the issue view as well. 

I'll keep you posted on that! 

[Marcell Bendik]

Atlassian has an "Enterprise" tier. It would be great that this "Enterprise" promise would be included in architecture design thoughts.

On real enterprise level now we have to fight between business segments how to set it up. Each business segments have different needs (B2B or B2C needs are quiet different, internal and external support needs are quiet different). We try to operate worldwide with thousands licenses in loosely coupled business segments. Can you imagine that we can find a good solution with a product level setting?

[John Funk]

Thank you @Jehan Gonsalkorale ! This is fantastic!!

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this @Jehan Gonsalkorale 

[Aaron Geister]

Super excited for this. I know some places this was a blocker for them and using workarounds. Its pretty cool. How a small feature can make such a big difference.

[Phil M]

I appreciate the ability to change this setting.  This has been driving me a little crazy the last few days. 

However, I don't like the fact that this is an organizational level product setting.  We are an organization that has more than one Jira Service Management project.  I believe it would be far better for this to be a project level setting which would provide much better flexibility for organizations like ours.  

[Trevan Householder_Isos-Tech-Consulting_]

This is great, and is a long-awaited-for feature, but all teams don't have the same needs. Some want it one way and others want it the other way. Ideally, this could be a setting at the screen level, but at the very least, at the project level. 

[Mikel Whipple]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale , as an enterprise customer I approve your team to do the work of getting this as an option on each transition screen instead of a universal setting. I am dead serious, you let us know what these other enterprise customers need to do to convince Atlassian this is a the way it should be and the development should be on the roadmap. 

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi all, 

Final update here to close the loop. 

There have been some good suggestions here (thanks @Mikel Whipple , @Trevan Householder_Isos-Tech-Consulting_ @Phil M , @Marcell Bendik and @Dirk Ronsmans and on Community asking for some further improvements. I've created two JAC tickets so people can vote so we get a sense of how many customers have this need.

1. More granular customisation option for default comment behaviour on transition screens: This is for customers who need this setting at the project or transition screen level. I've created one ticket so we can pool votes across both solutions to help us decide whether there is a strong case to build one of these solutions. We can than engage with you to figure out which option makes more sense. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-17209
2. Need clearer distinction between internal and external comments on issue transition comments: This is for the customers who asked for clearer differentiation between the two comment types so agents are more cognisant of who will be able to see their comment when they make it. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-17210

Please vote so we can get a sense of how important this is to you to help us prioritise. I'd honestly love to just ship this, but we need to understand how many customers need these improvements so we can justify the opportunity cost (we'd have to deprioritise other work to get this done). 

Thanks to everyone for their engagement here!

Also, quick update that we're going to be adding another setting next month that will let you set the default comment behaviour on the issue view when you use the keyboard shortcut "M". 

Let me know if you need anything else, always here to help. 

Best regards, 

Jehan Gonsalkorale

Principal Product Manager

[George G]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale Riddle me this. The page is titled “New Jira Service Management settings toggle Set default behaviour for transition screen comments” yet your instructions only show how to change this setting globally. So how do I change the default comment visibility on the transition screen only without affecting every other project in the instance? Or was the title simply wrong?

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @George G , thanks for the comment. The title refers to a setting in Jira Service Management but doesn't specify whether this is at the transition, project or instance level. Sorry if that wasn't clear. 

I have received feedback that many customers would like this toggle to exist at the project level, which is very understandable. Different teams do have have different needs. To track this request, I have created another feature request here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-17209. 

While I understand that it'd be your preference that we simply did this work, we do have a lot of feature requests and work in flight, so we need to assess the need before we can make a case for it. So, please do add your vote and leave a comment as that does help us understand how many customers are affected by this. 

I hope that helps, 

Jehan

[Christoph Körner]

Introducing this as a global setting is obviously not an "Enterprise" solution. Please proceed and make it useable on a transition screen level as this is the granularity that makes the most sense for a ticket workflow