Customers interact with your support team via Zendesk tickets. What happens when they report a bug or have a feature request? You need a way to inform your dev teams and track progress so you can keep the customer up to date on the status of their request.
Enter: the Jira and Zendesk integration!
Turns out, Zendesk themselves needed a way to do that and published an add-on that helps set this up.
Things to keep in mind:
- You may want to use a service account for the setup. This ensures that any updates back and forth are clearly from the system and not from an actual person.
- The integration allows the Jira and Zendesk tickets to remain separate (no extra noise when dev teams are commenting on Jira tickets back and forth) but you can make purposeful comments from Jira to Zendesk and vice versa.
- You can, from the Jira side, narrow the list of projects Zendesk Agents can create a Jira ticket on. We highly recommend narrowing down to ONE Jira project if you can! As you scale, you'll find that Zendesk Agents don't always pick the right Jira project to post a ticket.
- How to update the Zendesk ticket status based on the linked Jira ticket status: The integration does NOT out of the box, update a Zendesk status. It does show the Jira ticket status in the app sidebar, but does not move a Zendesk ticket from, say, On Hold, to Open. That said, you can set this up:
- Create a custom dropdown field in Zendesk, add it to the form(s)
- On the Jira side, set up a one-way sync from Jira status to the custom Zendesk field.
- Then simply set up Triggers to change the Zendesk status when the custom field changes to the desired state.
- For example, when a Jira ticket goes to "Released" or "Done" status, you can map that to a "Released" or "Done" status in the Zendesk custom field. Then your trigger in Zendesk sees the custom field is changed to "Released" or "Done" and updates the Zendesk ticket status to Open.
- Level up! Use Targets to post an automated private comment to let the Zendesk ticket Assignee know the bug is fixed and to communicate as needed to the customer.
Our consultants can help you set this up if you get lost! Send us a note today by clicking "Submit a Request" on the top right.