JIRA Service Desk

Jira Service Desk is a customer support solution which integrates with their other software applications HipChat and Confluence. HipChat makes it possible to have group chat and share media files and documents in your Jira Service Desk account and is free to get started. And Confluence is their Wiki like software which allows you to create an intricate knowledge base and help resource area for your team and customers. I like the real time information sharing which means you can evaluate and assess problems and work them out with your team while on the same page making it much more efficient and productive generally speaking. The ability to configure your customer portal with custom fields is a nice feature because there are various needs which can be prevented or resolved quickly with the right information up front. You're able to customize your entire service desk custom fields in some cool ways. It's nice and easy to sign up users as well as manage them in your account. The email integration is also a great feature to have so you can stay in contact with your customers right from your account without having to leave and login to another. The time sheet tab via Tempo is another cool way to track time against accounts and projects. The increased workflow possible by using Jira Support Desk with Confluence and Hipchat is great. The ability to create and utilize analytic reporting based on your performance is also very useful data which helps you to adapt your process to become better performing. You can really become very effective in the role empowered by such easy tools to use.

I believe the configuration options could be taken further with the ability to identify users arranged by greater levels of classification and match them to various service levels offered. I've read the company can be slow to releases fixes to critical issues but haven't had this experience yet myself. The user interface doesn't feels a bit busy at times with information seeming slightly scattered though perhaps it's because there are no borders for certain features but it's not a major issue once you get used to how it all works together. The pricing is quite fair if you're just getting started with paid plans starting at $10 per month for up to three users. But it jumps drastically to $1500 for five users per year and you don't start seeing savings until you're at the twenty five user plan at $6500 per year. But this doesn't include Confluence nor HipChat at all so that's really steep actually I'm quite surprised I didn't realize the price change was this drastic. There's so many other options out there it's really tough to justify this cost which jumps from $3.33 per user to over forty or fifty or sixty for the exact same functionality. If the company was transparent about their profit margin like a few companies do when they measure it all out for you to see where it all goes that would go a long way for prospects to understand this.

There's definitely a lot of functionality available in your Jira Service Desk account. I'm impressed with it because I felt that Confluence seemed lacking on it's own. I felt that it should be integrated into their service desk and project management softwares. But as it turns out they are a really good compliment to each other. And because they are relatively cost effective solutions easy to justify the combined costs. At least the integrations are occurring within a single company so you know your customer support or project management solution is kept in house even though it requires two or three softwares if you include HipChat to make it complete.