How to Use Merge Agent for Jira to Manage Duplicate Support Requests

Managing customer requests efficiently is essential for a clean and effective service desk. Duplicate tickets can clutter your system and hinder productivity. This guide presents a practical solution to this issue, demonstrating how Merge Agent for Jira can streamline your workflow by merging duplicate tickets into a single issue.

Introduction To Merge Agent for Jira

Merge Agent for Jira is a powerful app available on the Marketplace, designed to simplify your workflow by consolidating duplicate tickets. This not only cleans up your service desk but also ensures that all relevant information is in one place, making it easier for your team to deliver prompt and accurate responses.

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Establish Your Queues

To manage customer requests effectively, consider setting up two types of queues:

The Team Queue: This queue prioritizes older tickets, ensuring they are addressed in the order received, regardless of the time required to resolve them.

The Triage Queue: This queue, managed by designated agents, focuses on newer tickets that can be resolved quickly. The triage role rotates among team members, ensuring flexibility and efficiency.

2. Identify and Merge Duplicates

The triage agent, equipped with Merge Agent for Jira, plays a key role in identifying and merging duplicate tickets. Here's the process:

Early Detection: The triage agent reviews new tickets as they arrive, swiftly identifying duplicates.

Merging Process: Upon spotting a duplicate, the agent uses Merge Agent for Jira to merge it with the main ticket, effectively eliminating the duplicate and consolidating information.

3. Understand When and What to Merge

Duplicates can occur for various reasons, such as customers forgetting to include specific details in their original request, sending multiple attachments across different tickets, or accidentally submitting the same question twice. The content to be merged can vary:

• Sometimes, only the description of the duplicate ticket is added to the main ticket.

• In other cases, all attachments from the duplicate are included in the merge.

• Comments are rarely merged, as the triage agent typically acts quickly upon the creation of new tickets.

Conclusion

The strategy of using Merge Agent for Jira to manage duplicate tickets demonstrates an efficient and effective method for keeping the service desk organized. This approach not only streamlines the process of responding to customer requests but also enhances the team's ability to focus on solving unique issues rather than navigating through duplicates.

Adopting this method can significantly improve the operation of your service desk, ensuring that your team maintains high levels of productivity and customer satisfaction. With the right tools and strategies, managing customer requests can be a streamlined and efficient process.

This use case is based on an Atlassian community article about the use case of our customer Futureweb.