How do I add a customer to JIRA without email?

[Emmerentia Jacobs]

Our clients interact with our JIRA service desk purely via WhatsApp (we use the WhatsApp connector for JIRA). We want to update the generic reporter from WhatsApp connector for JIRA, to be the actual client, but we do not have an email address for our client, only their mobile number. How do we add our clients as customers in this scenario?

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Emmerentia  - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You can't add any users in Jira (including customers) without an email address. 

However, you can allow anonymous users to create issues in Jira Service Management projects. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/blog/2017/04/introducing-the-login-free-portal-for-jira-service-desk-cloud

[John Funk]

You are welcome and best of luck!

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Emmerentia Jacobs 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

I don't think you can add the user as a customer in that case.

To be able to specify a user as a reporter, assignee, watcher, or participant they must have an Atlassian account. All Atlassian accounts are based on an email.  Therefore, the customer can only be specified as the Reporter if they have an email and an Atlassian account exists for that email.

If the WhatsApp connector provides the user's name, you could record that in another field. But you can't set it in the Reporter field.

[Emmerentia Jacobs]

Thank you for the feedback @Trudy Claspill and @John Funk ! We will look into using custom fields to link all a customer's communications to form a single view of each our customers.