Is it possible to merge tickets in the same Service Desk Project?

[Jillian Marabut]

Our customers are not licensed JIRA users, hence their access is limited to just submitting a ticket through the Customer Portal and receiving automated notifications via e-mail. 

For our escalation process, since customers do not have a way to open the ticket and directly make changes to the status, we have utilized our mailboxes to accommodate escalations.

The current workflow is that we only accept a request coursed through email via the dedicated mailboxes per project if its purpose is to escalate an existing ticket within the service desk (otherwise, it won't be entertained/looked into) —  this is communicated via our internal documentations and incorporated in our notifications. Now, when a ticket comes in via e-mail, it is automatically in an "Escalated" status, while containing the information of the original ticket being escalated. This would then allow agents to tag the original ticket to "Escalated" triggering the right notifications and alerting the right team/resources. 

The workaround is working as expected so far. However, we have received comments/suggestions if it would be possible to not create a second ticket when escalations are raised. We do not see this as a possibility unless we provide licenses to all our customers — which isn't an option, or if we structure our escalation in a more manual fashion. 

Is there a way to merge tickets? My thought is to have our escalation ticket triggers (requests that come in via-email) automatically linked to an existing ticket depending on certain criteria we specify. I have explored the "Automation" tab under "Project Settings" however, the conditions seem very limited to roll-out what I have in mind. 

[Eric · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jillian Marabut

Have you had any luck with the problem? One possible solution is to create an automation rule that checks if a comment contains a certain keyword and if it does transition the issue to a particular status.

To escalate, your customers can simply reply to the email they receive after creating a ticket via the portal. They just need to make sure the reply contains the keyword you specified in your rule.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have further questions.

[Jillian Marabut]

Hi @Eric Thanks for your inputs! To address our predicament, in our workflow, we've just added a step for our Jira Service Desk agents to manually link the trigger tickets to the main/original tickets. The issue mostly revolves around the idea of having 2 separate tickets possibly causing confusion. 

I am currently testing different automation rules based on your suggestion. Just to clarify — do you mean that we can also automate the process, in a way that when customers reply to the auto-generated notification we have setup for when issues are created via portal, the ticket automatically changes to a certain status depending on a keyword we specify based on how we setup the automation? 

[Eric]

Hi @Jillian Marabut 

Just to clarify — do you mean that we can also automate the process, in a way that when customers reply to the auto-generated notification we have setup for when issues are created via portal, the ticket automatically changes to a certain status depending on a keyword we specify based on how we setup the automation? 

Correct. If you navigate to the 'Automation' item in 'Service Desk Settings', you should have some preconfigured rules. One of them is called: '

Comment updates reply status'. You should be able to use this rule as a starting point and add a 'Comment contains' condition. You may need to tweak existing conditions too e.g. changing the 'User is not a customer' condition to 'User is a customer'. 

[Jillian Marabut]

Hi again, @Eric 

So when a customer replies via email to an auto-generated notification, it is considered by Jira as a comment? 

[Eric]

Hi @Jillian Marabut ,

Yes, when a customer replies to the email notification, the reply will be added as a comment to the associated issue.

[Jillian Marabut]

Just tested this. Thank you very much! This has been very helpful! @Eric 

[Marlene Kegel - codefortynine · Accepted solution]

Hello @Jillian Marabut ,

You can merge two or more JSD tickets with our Jira cloud app Merge Agent for Jira. This needs to be done manually by a JSD agent/ Jira user, so maybe that's not what you've been looking for?

If you have questions or feedback about Merge Agent for Jira, don't hesitate to get in touch with our support.

[Jillian Marabut]

Thank you very much, Marlene. I'll be looking into the add-on. But we were hoping to exhaust something from just within JIRA.  

[Bert-Jan Kamp]

Hi @Eric

It is impossible to automate Jira in a way to catch all cases were it generates a new ticket while someone responds to an existing one. This in particular happens when 3rd parties are using their own help desk software. So a feature where one can merge one ticket with another ticket is highly appreciated as like @Jillian Marabut said linking the many tickets is very confusing absolutely not productive and you also need to maintain the status of these tickets :-(. Looking forward for Jira to implement the merge option sooner than later :-) as current options are not really usable.

[Jillian Marabut]

I agree! Thanks for your inputs @Bert-Jan Kamp