Jira Service Desk as a simple administration solution with minimal overhead

With rising order intake, more processes and ever greater networking, the administrative effort that does not directly contribute to customer benefit automatically increases. Jira Service Desk can easily help to easily manage and centralize all kinds of requests and the related communication. In the following lines, we will show you, on the basis of the non-profit project "We keep on learning" of our colleague Tobias Schär, what benefits such a simple tool can bring.

Ticketing instead of mailboxes and mail flows

Due to COVID-19, there is currently an increased demand for hardware for home schooling. Many families cannot afford to equip their children with personal computers. "We keep on learning" aims to give old hardware a further life cycle. Old laptops are accepted, then processed and then given away to those in need. Behind each of these steps are forms, review processes and also decisions, which could actually be dealt with by e-mail. Since Tobias started the project on his own, he was aware from the beginning that he had to keep the administrative effort to a minimum. Therefore we, linkyard ltd., provided him with an instance of Jira Service Desk, with which he can easily collect all necessary information and does not have to use his normal mail inbox anymore. In detail this is how it works:

On the project website wir-lernen-weiter.ch, donors and those seeking help can reach the appropriate service desk in one step. From there you can click on one of the three buttons. Behind it there is a form, which collects the most important information about the respective request. After filling out the form, a user account is automatically created based on the email address and linked to the request. So there is no need for a special registration process, which impairs usability and tempts people to leave the process. For this special configuration the plugin "LoginFree for Jira Service Desk" is used, which makes this possible.

In the case of WLW, there are requests for donations and help, as well as general inquiries. There is also a ticket type for the administration of the devices, which can only be generated by the WLW team. All these ticket types have an underlying handling process. Let's take a look at the example of a help request:

The square boxes each represent a status and the arrows show from where to where a status can be changed. Even though this may look very confusing at first glance, there is more system behind it than you might think. For example, you have to be able to distinguish whether a laptop is to be sent by mail or picked up. If you want to send your laptop by mail, you have to pay the shipping costs before you accept a request for help. The corresponding information, e.g. "Mailing: Yes/No", can be displayed during a status change or on the ticket overview. Coupled with appropriate filters, reporting components can be easily assembled to provide the most important information quickly and easily, for example, how many laptops still need to be sent by post.

Filters and dashboards - all in Jira Service Desk

These reporting options can be used in Jira Service Desk with the system dashboards. A simple visual structure allows new requests to be seen at a glance and current donation and help requests to be easily viewed.

For the use cases of "Wir lernen weiter", Jira Service Desk is a simple and lean solution that also scales. This would not be possible with conventional mailbox management. 

Within a few hours of work, the system was configured so that it could be used productively. The example shows how quickly and easily different processes of a business model can be better supported electronically and how they can provide added value for both providers and customers. Would you also like to explore the possibilities of Jira Service Desk? Contact us for your free 30-day test environment.

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About the author

Tobias Schär is business consultant at linkyard. Although he has only been with us since March, he is able to contribute his strengths in business analysis and customer support. With his project "We keep on learning" he makes an important contribution to the digitalization in Switzerland - laptop by laptop - in addition to his employment and his extra-occupational studies at the University of Lucerne.