How to organize bug tickets around customers

[Lars Böhnke]

Hey there! What I experienced so far, JIRA is lacking some kind of functionality to log customers on tickets.

In our case we have several bug tickets reported by customers. Our goal is

• to log customers on the tickets
• so we can report on them
• and generate/rank them by impact
• notify the customer once the bug is fixed

We do use the JIRA and Intercom integration but this makes the issues not accessible through a filter. Any good workarounds here?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

How are you storing your "customers"? 

Off-the-shelf, you can simply use a custom field to do this if it's a known list, or set them up as users so you can use them in the reporter field or other custom fields.

Or you could install Service Desk and use the "customers" and "organisations" in there.

But I suspect there's something else here that I don't know.

[Lars Böhnke]

Hey @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-thanks for the answer! We have a MongoDB where our users are stored. We then use Segment.io to push them to other apps, for example Intercom.

you can simply use a custom field to do this if it's a known list

that doesn't work since we are continuously adding new users etc. – someone would have to maintain those list which is not realistic.

or set them up as users so you can use them in the reporter field or other custom fields.

But then we would have to pay for lets say 500 users?!

Or you could install Service Desk and use the "customers" and "organisations" in there.

Since we are using Intercom, that does not really make sense here, I guess.

I think the best way would be to not use bugs in JIRA but in a tool which can actually handle bug reporting from customers (for example Productboard or Prodpad) and then push the bug over to JIRA once we decide to tackle it. Not the preferred solution but JIRA lacks really some features here in my opinion :)

[Lars Böhnke]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-ok I dig a bit deeper into this JIRA Service Desk idea – and I changed my opinion. Question here is, if its possible to create the Customers automatically without knowing them. We use Segment.io (like I mentioned). Would it also be possible to have multiple reporters on one issue? Most of the time several customers are impacted by a bug. Are there filter options then?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>if its possible to create the Customers automatically without knowing them.

As long as you have contact details for customers (i.e. an email address), then yes, you can add them.  I don't know how to do it "automatically", but I'd reach for something in segment that can tell Jira to create new customers via the REST interface.  (I've seen a user database that had a trigger that created Jira users when new people were added to certain tables in it, but that was a long time ago)>Would it also be possible to have multiple reporters on one issue? No, an issue only has one reporter.  But I know why you're looking for more.  It's generally not the right approach, you should be thinking "single reporter, but many people impacted" (which you can do with a multi-user-picker custom field), but I think there's a blog you might find useful.  It does lean a bit on ScriptRunner, so yes, you could accuse me of advertising Adaptavist add-ons, but that is not the intention, I just think Phill's write-up is useful in general for this sort of thing (and you can do most of it without SR).  https://www.adaptavist.com/blog/improving-your-triage-for-better-incident-management-in-jira/

[Tobias Binna]

Hi Lars, just came across your post. Full disclosure upfront: I am the creator of Intercom for Jira ;-)

Regarding your points, I believe the first and the last point is covered by Intercom for Jira (to log customers on the ticket and notify the customer once the bug is fixed).

Regarding reporting on customers and generate/rank them by impact, you might need to help me a bit with some clarifications.

What you can do today is to use the JQL features to search and report on linked Intercom conversations.

For example, if you want to get a list of all issues of project ENG sorted by the number of Intercom conversations linked to them you could use this query:

project = ENG ORDER BY linkedIntercomConversationCount DESC

This might not be exactly what you are looking for. If I understand your points correctly,  you would rather link customers directly to issues and report on them instead of conversations. Is that correct?

I did not understand what you meant by "We do use the JIRA and Intercom integration but this makes the issues not accessible through a filter." Do you mind explaining a bit more?