How the Developer (in JIRA Software) communicate with the customers (contacting over the customer portal)?

[IT Support]

We have a Support who use JIRA ServiceDesk and Developer Teams working with JIRA Software.

Often there are Tickets, raised by a Customer over the customer portal in Service Desk, with something to do for the Devs.
What is the best way for a Developer (with JIRA Software) to ask further questuins to the customer about his problem? We want to avoid a proxy-job to the support-team (Dev > Support > Custopmer > Support > Dev).

Is the only way to buy a SD License for all the Devs too?

Thanks for answering!

[Dereon Triplett]

aye oh naw i gotta deseses wanna down on your naborhood spread on the flees

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The agent should add the developer to the request as a "collaborator" to start with.

[IT Support]

okay, but that enables the Dev not to share a customer comment which is visible on the customer portal issue view for the customer... So no interaction possible.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's the Agent's role to talk to the customer.

[Karol Jochelson]

I have to disagree that it is only the agents role to talk to the customer, not all organizations work with business analysts, often the developer is the analyst. Also, often the agent does not have the technical knowledge to ask the customer the correct stuff. We have advanced customers in our organization that need to collaborate directly with developers. This is a key issue that might be the reason we look elsewhere for a service desk solution. 

[IT Support]

Hey Karol, how your developers collaborate with the customer?

[Karol Jochelson]

Hi Holger, we are unfortunately still using TracProject, The software is a bit outdated and not very customer friendly but collaboration is available on all levels. We are currently trying to migrate to JIRA but the customer / developer collaboration issue is holding us back.  We do a lot of in-house software development, so a customer might for example report an issue they are having on our intranet, our first line of support (service desk) makes sure it's not a technical problem, if not, the issue is redirected to a developer (software) and the developer continues the conversation with the customer until resolved. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I completely understand that.  But a Service Desk is NOT the route for close work between a customer and a development team.  A service desk is not there for development work, it is there to stop the customers bothering the developers with things that they don't need to get involved with.

If you have "advanced customers" who should be behaving in similar ways to "product owners", then they should be added to your JIRA Software as proper users so they can work alongside your developers.

[Karol Jochelson]

I definitely agree with you Nic that developers need to be shielded from issues that do not concern them, but simultaneously we want a single entry point for all our customers and do not want the customer to decide whether or not they are an "advanced" customer. So we actually want the service desk agent to decide whether or not the user should act as a "product owner" on the current issue. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You wouldn't let the customer decide - you'd let the developers decide, and if they need the customer to be a product owner, give them a JIRA account that lets them into the dev projects.

[IT Support]

But you cant use the benefits of the customer portal - simple layout and clear informations. 
A JIRA issue with the JIRA software license is much more overload of inormations and things you don't need to know or use as a customer. Thats not a trivial thing, i think.

[Karol Jochelson]

Hi Nic, thanks for your reply. We have +-1500 customers, so giving them a temporary JIRA account each time they are need in an issue is just not viable. The only way I currently see to resolve this issue is to run our development projects as service desk projects and developers will have to create linked issues to their software projects. This is obviously not the route I would like to go, but I see no other way. Can JIRA not simply add customer comments to Software issues and then display then on all linked service desk pages in ex. Linked Issue Comments? This will be my last comment for today as I don't have enough points   

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think Holger has clarified it for me.

Customers benefit from a simplified and focussed interface and don't need more informatio.  Product owners need JIRA access.  You're mixing up the two roles, and that's going to get messy.

Running development projects as service desk projects is going to be counterintuitive as all the SD stuff is going to complicate and obscure the development things.  You could do it, but it's not going to be nice (or cheap, as all your developers will need to be agents)

I think you need to clearly separate out "customers" and provide proper access for "product owners"