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