How to Prepare for Jira Service Management Import

Basics of the Migration to Jira Service Management 

Modern brands may perform as companies, products, or services or work with other businesses and individuals. However, the secret key to success in all these cases is to provide outstanding experiences. It means that your customer support has to create such experiences and satisfy your clients. That is because customers are the main people determining your brand’s meaning and business value. Let’s suppose that your organization has an appropriate customer satisfaction approach, different loyalty programs, service desk software, and professional support agents. Therefore, you still need to put all existing puzzle pieces into one big picture.

The most critical question related to brand strategy is the following: how to keep your brand growing? Of course, both success and failure in various types of business depend on numerous factors. Among these are implementing an efficient help desk tool and benefiting from its value to your organization’s support team and end-users. Thus, migrating to a new help desk software solution may come out as a relevant juncture. Your company may continue perpetuating previous errors and importing information. Or you can establish a new phase to optimize business performance.

Probably you can get upset and believe that your business is carrying out the wrong tasks. Unfortunately, that provides a blurred picture of migrating data and conducting different accompanying procedures. They include preparing a database, important business processes, team members, configuring a destination service desk, etc. Also, the feeling of insecurity can appear because of your further steps.

Managing Risks in the Service Desk Migration

Next, we will dive deeply into the ways of planning, executing, and checking the results of help desk migration. But before, we should analyze the process of importing and migrating data from an untypical viewpoint. Have you ever dealt with the five steps of the well-known Air Force Risk Management practices? If not, let’s name them:

1. Defining hazards;
2. Considering risk control measures;
3. Assessing risk levels; 
4. Making relevant risk decisions;
5. Planning risk avoidance.

So, how does such a process refer to switching service desk tools? You may think about this question using the following approach. If you find this reading interesting and potentially helpful, the first step is already passed. Besides, you have identified the critical weak spots in your current service desk tool. Thus, the second step is successfully passed. You think Jira Service Management is a perfect help desk platform to meet your business needs. 

Thanks to this guide, you can efficiently overcome the final three steps. For example, we will explain the main features of the appropriate data import and migration. That helps cover the step called “assessing risk levels.” The information we offer will bring to you the background necessary for making risk decisions and planning risk avoidance. In simple words, you will analyze:

• how things are gone;
• what problems may occur;
• how to work with all of that effectively.

What Makes a Documented Plan Valuable? 

After deciding that your business should migrate to Jira Service Management, you need to remember the following. The appropriate planning is just 50% of success. In addition to knowing your destination, you have to consider the constant issues related to budget and spending. 

At the same time, you need to create a well-documented plan. Also, you must ensure its availability for all departments or teams within your company. But what points should you include in the certain plan? Here, it is crucial to answering these three questions:

• Who takes responsibility for transferring data to Jira Service Management? No doubt that changing a service desk tool influences the entire business. For instance, that may affect some departments more significantly than others. Thus, you need to appoint a responsible manager for the migration process for answering emerging questions and dispelling concerns.
• What data will you migrate? To begin with, you should review and refine the service desk information. Often, there is no need for organizations to store all their data on the new tool. It means the new help desk software serves as a blank canvas to store something that matters.
• How long will the process take? When it comes to help desk migration, time is considered a precious commodity. Setting a clear deadline allows for planning all the processing and showing the best performance. That helps avoid the deadline postponing as well as budget overspending.

Ultimately, your company has to choose the most suitable method. You can use a third-party migration service or implement a Jira Service Management import tool. From a tech standpoint, you need a development team sharing the same understanding of operations and tasks. Also, this team must be able to handle processes appropriately.

How Data Import Differs from Data Migration

Data import requires exporting the organization’s database using specific CSV files. Such a process means much more work if your company has the old service desk software. On the other side, data migration services are responsible for handling the process of transferring your service desk documentation to Jira Service Management. Here, you just need to order and pay for the desired result.

Specific Aspects of Importing Data

• You can plan to apply Jira Service Management by importing backup information from your current platform. That requires changing the file structure or reimporting the records.
• During the import process to the new platform, you may have to upload the records in a specific order. That allows for preserving the relationships.
• Importing data always enables you to upload custom entities.
• During the information import, you have no opportunity to use multiple files. It means you can transfer only one document per time.
• The quality of the information in Jira Service Management relies on the information you have transferred from your previous service desk.

Specific Aspects of Migrating Data

• Data migration means you can apply different record sources.
• Migrating data requires transferring custom entities and fields. However, your destination service desk software should have the same referring entities and fields.
• The appropriate API-based migration allows saving time and switching information between the help desk tools securely.
• If you forget about cleansing the organization’s database before migrating, the quality of records on Jira Service Management will be poor.

Your business may have already started preparing for Jira Service Management import. Or you have been using this help desk solution for some time. So consider the mentioned tips and practices corresponding to data import and data migration for ensuring your success. 

Why is Jira Service Management Import a Wise Decision?

Providing clients with more touchpoints results in more satisfied and returning customers for your business. The efficient help desk platform allows for organizing customer queries, facilitating communication between clients and the company, and tracking customer satisfaction rates. Also, your support agents can route various channels, including email, webchats, phone calls, and social media, into one specific place.

Today, there is a similar scenario for many organizations. Since their client bases are growing, support teams must spend more time carrying out numerous routing tasks. And their current tools cannot meet the increasing business requirements. Therefore, they decide to implement new software solutions. Jira Service Management has an excellent reputation and offers a toolbox that can fulfill the expectations of different businesses.

What can Jira Service Management Do?

The particular help desk software was created for driving client interactions. With Jira Service Management Support, you can maintain customer support interactions using a single place. That ensures seamless and personal communication and makes agents more productive, while clients are also delighted. Besides, thanks to the Jira Service Management product family, many organizations obtain opportunities for changing and meeting the changes smoothly. 

Below, you can check the features:

Finally, it is critical to understand correctly how Jira Service Management allows solving complex customer support issues. Next, we will briefly analyze how the key solutions work.

Jira Service Management Menu Overview

You can find the following items on the toolbar:

• Your work (it shows an overview of your issues, projects, boards, starred items, and work assigned to you)

• Dashboards (it allows you to view all dashboards or create a new dashboard)

• Projects (gives access to all your projects)

• Filters (allows you to find issues by projects, users, or using custom filters)

• People (shows your teammates and allows to invite new users and create teams)

• Apps (displays the list of your current apps and suggests additional apps for your team)

• Create (allows you to create a new issue)

When it comes to the top right corner, your agents will find the platform’s search box. There are also buttons to check your personal settings and notifications and reach Jira’s help center. After clicking on the avatar, the Profile Settings are opened.

• The email system serves as one of the methods to collect client feedback. When customers send emails to your organization’s support service, the tool automatically converts them into relevant tickets. Such tickets include all communication details. In the case of outgoing emails, you may apply Jira Service Management templates. Also, you can customize them depending on your brand requirements.
• The issue view provides support agents with a set of functions. It appears as a 2-column layout and shows you the key issue details like priority, reporter, time tracking, and more. Within the issue view, you can add subtasks and attachments, change issue status, and configure the issue layout. You can also perform such actions as vote, give feedback, move, or clone the issue. No matter how far you scrolled, you can quickly comment on the issue.
• Automation rules are crucial for all support agents due to triggering and automating repetitive tasks that depend on preconditioned events. For instance, you can assign specific kinds of tickets to support representatives who are experts in these questions or issues. In addition, you might add macros when addressing repetitive problems.
• The reports allow you to get the analysis of predefined conditions about the clients’ activities, support team, and each separate agent. Also, you can analyze the SLA agreement, both the first and the average reply time, along with the resolving time. But you should remember that the more expensive tier you purchase, the better analytics capabilities you obtain.

Jira Service Management offers customization options. For example, you can edit templates, add custom CSS or conduct JavaScript rebranding. These actions allow you to add your brand identity. Besides, your business rules, workflows, triggers, or even email templates can be modified if needed.

Jira Service Management Pricing Plans

Jira Service Management offers customers two pricing tiers and one enterprise-level subscription. Moreover, you can gain tiered discount pricing when adding over 15 support agents to each plan.

Standard Plan

A particular tier is a perfect option for teams desiring to standardize their service management activities. A monthly subscription for this plan starts at $20 7.50 per agent, while the annual starts at 750/year for up to 10 users.

With Jira Service Management’s Standard plan, your organization gets the following key features:

• 1 to 5 post-mortems
• automation options
• service request management
• knowledge base, but it needs a Confluence subscription
• incident management 
• issue management
• self-service portal

Premium Plan

This tier is suitable for scaling companies that require more file storage and more advanced features. Such features may involve integrating with external services or IP allow listings. A monthly subscription for the Premium plan starts at $40 per agent, while the annual starts at 1450/ year per 10 users.

With Jira Service Management’s Premium plan, you obtain multiple features, in addition to the ones offered by the Standard:

• an unlimited number of major incidents for a month
• service subscriptions
• integration with various third-party services
• health analysis of services, and infrastructure
• admin-related insights
• unlimited storage space
• 99.9% uptime SLA

Enterprise Plan

The enterprise tier is also available, and it is billed annually. Apart from the Standard and Premium plan features, you gain the 99.95% uptime SLA.

Ultimately, you should not forget about the add-ons. Jira Service Management’s free trial provides potential clients with light versions of all. But why can you purchase such products for a separate price? That is because many organizations prefer using other tools rather than Jira native ones. Therefore, this platform offers a significant feature: you can select only the required products and look for other solutions elsewhere.

What Are the Key Competitors? 

Today, there are numerous help desk platforms available on the market, attracting customers and creating competition for Jira Service Management. So let’s analyze some of the top competitors with brief head-to-head comparisons.

Jira Service Management vs Freshdesk

The priority function of the service desk is to improve the client support process by making it more efficient and timely. When exploring Freshdesk and Jira Service Management, both tools have some critical advantages and disadvantages. Below, there are three main features illustrating Freshdesk benefits:

• With a collaborative workspace, Freshdesk can advance the overall quality of support service and increase agents’ productivity;
• Thanks to the extensive content filtering, you will obtain the necessary information;
• Different filters you may apply to views allow prioritizing tickets and responding faster.

Jira Service Management vs Help Scout 

Help Scout allows companies to address customer problems using relevant channels where they make requests in separate mailboxes. So, you can sort the tickets within a particular mailbox into specific folders. Also, you can make them visible for the whole mailbox or only chosen agents. Such folder organization appears quite inflexible and less convenient compared to Jira Service Management. Clients may come from different channels to resolve the same problem, and support representatives struggle when getting the interaction history. On the other hand, Jira Service Management enables agents to create different ticket views depending on the set of conditions.

In addition, Help Scout provides automation called workflows that are mailbox specific, and you cannot divide them by function. Unfortunately, this platform offers no global automation because of the existing mailbox scheme. But in Jira Service Management, you can employ triggers, SLA, or macros for automating the required processes.

When it comes to reporting options, Help Scout depends on the Views tool. It performs like a filter that allows adding a search field, including types, tags, folders, or other custom fields. Besides, Help Scout offers no opportunity to schedule report emails. However, Jira Service Management provides numerous customizations for getting the necessary data, scheduling its delivery, and sharing it across the organization.

As a consequence: in the Help Scout to Jira Service Management comparison, the second is a winner.

Jira Service Management vs Zendesk

Zendesk is among the strongest competitors to Jira Service Management. Both platforms offer ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) processes. But when the first tool is certified and provides these processes on a full scale, the second partly adheres to them. The key difference between the two platforms lies in the primary use cases. Jira Service Management mostly deals with the software development process, while Zendesk is efficient for end-user communication.

When comparing the most critical points, Jira offers many activities feeds at different levels and outstanding reporting options. In the case of Zendesk, its key features are automation, two-way communication, and an excellent knowledge base.

Discussing the deployment process, Zendesk needs a little setup for getting started. Meanwhile, Jira Service Management requires some time to train and adapt appropriately.

Jira Service Management vs HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is a relatively new tool that provides customers with significant functionality. The main features include ticketing, live chats, reporting options, automation, and a knowledge base. But other service desk vendors also offer such functions.

When it comes to the disadvantages of HubSpot Service Hub, among the most crucial is the one-level pricing tier. You need to pay $400 per month for five agents. Moreover, the reporting add-on and API access are also costly: $200 per month and $500 per month accordingly. After all, you have to pay $80 per month for every additional agent.

Right now, it may be hard to consider HubSpot Service Hub a strong competitor to Jira Service Management. Since this platform is new, its feature suite may face some changes in the future after receiving customer feedback.

Top 5 Tips for a Change Expert: How to Convince Your Team to Implement Service Desk Software

The different changes in the business world are inevitable and necessary. Thus, switching from email to a help desk platform is considered an expected shift. Such a step helps maximize the efficiency of client support operations and enhance the quality of your products or services. Also, it allows reducing the support team’s workload. But often, employees are intimidated by similar changes. It means that convincing your support agents to apply help desk software may become a significant business challenge.

At the same time, teams may regard a particular change as the least popular thing. So, your entire team should understand correctly and reinforce by the action your intention of Jira Service Management import. Of course, you need to have your employees’ support for this innovation to provide the organizational “buy-in.” Below, there are some critical tips to make a relevant process easier.

1. Become a Change Expert 

To begin with, you have to learn the maximum number of details regarding the organization's import and a chosen system. In our case, it is Jira Service Management. Besides, you must have answers to different questions that are crucial when you will ask your team to support changes. And the essential thing is that you should see a help desk import as an excellent opportunity yourself. If not, your team members will not understand its benefits. 

2. Ensure the Early Discussion

Conducting the early discussion about service desk import helps minimize the impact and obtain a mutual understanding of its value. In addition, staff can provide more support if they take part in the decision-making process. However, you should prepare for the potential resistance and remain open to your employees’ feedback.

3. Show How Valuable the Change is

During the discussion, you have to ensure that all advantages of the selected service desk software are explained appropriately. And your support agents must understand them. Perhaps it may become challenging to prove the change’s value. In this case, you can remember several past problems and show how the service desk tool can address them.

4. Know Who is Your Audience

When delivering your arguments, pay great attention to your audience. It is critical to get their support, so you need to follow three practices:

• use a communication style suitable for your team members;
• choose the time that fits their preferences;
• select a place where the audience can feel comfortable. 

5. Confirm the Audience’s Support

After discussing a proposed change, answering questions, and collecting feedback from your team, you have to confirm support. Here, you should not accept various vague responses: only yes or no.

Some Ideas to Show the Value of Service Desk Software

One of the most typical answers of employees who refuse to implement a help desk tool is the following: “It is impersonal!” Therefore, you must explain to your agents the three main reasons that make a service desk system valuable:

• it helps track issues
• it increases the efficiency of the team’s workload
• it eliminates the problems and records that fall through the cracks

Control how the process of getting familiar with the help desk platform goes. Within Jira Service Management, your organization can train new support agents by using a knowledge base. Or you can create a corporate forum where team members can communicate interesting tips and share downloadable resources. That allows your team to advance their skills and enrich their knowledge.

Praise and reward support representatives for dealing with the service desk software and enhancing their proficiency. You should make employees feel valuable to your organization, which will encourage them to remain loyal and satisfied. Also, you can implement the gamification approach and provide staff with specific badges for achieving predefined results.

Lastly, it appears to be a difficult way for your company to improve itself. Applying a service desk platform requires some time and effort and may face the resistance of your support team. But building a well-structured support service can bring numerous benefits to your organization. In other words, a help desk tool is among the most efficient components that allow your company to achieve its goals.

How to Get Started: Jira Service Management Import Checklist

If you get lost with importing customer support information or need some references, you will find the particular checklist helpful. At this moment, you should have already conducted the pre-import assessment. It means that you have carried out a detailed data audit, analyzed the existing processes, and determined the necessary scope of work:

• setting timelines for each phase and informing the data import team regarding the main tasks and deadlines;
• adding detailed descriptions to objectives so your team will have a common understanding of the future project;
• creating the communication plan for keeping the team, organization’s departments, executives, and stakeholders on the same path during the project progress;
• auditing the corporate data and checking the records’ quality;
• searching for duplicates and deleting various redundant records;
• developing training documentation for support agents to make the import to Jira Service Management easier.

Below, we have analyzed three critical areas where you have to consider “to-dos” carefully:

1. Prepare Your Company for Jira Service Management Import 

Whenever initiatives touch several departments, your organization will face competing goals and priorities. Thus, before importing a service desk tool, you must ensure that all employees are on the same page regarding your plan, goals, and deadlines. Moreover, a project manager must inform all involved about updates on the progress. In this case, you can develop a well-structured communication plan. 

2. Keep the Records and Documents Ready

Support agents depend on the information related to their roles and responsibilities. Also, other departments can use such information for performance, analytics, and reports. So, your company should guarantee information consistency and quality. When your records are already prepared for further import, check the following things:

• you have provided the first row with the relevant header;
• you have mapped headers and rows to specific fields and records respectively;
• you have checked the information for duplicates outside Jira Service Management or before the export of CSV files;
• you have made a backup for combating information loss phobia.

In addition, comparing your files to current requirements and limitations of Jira Service Management bulk import is obvious. Then, you should sort out the information into relevant files and columns.

3. Setup Jira Service Management

Before importing, you need to prepare the selected service desk software for information upload. It is crucial to create several custom fields because the import process might stop during the mapping phase in the case of their absence. 

7 Steps to Assure Your Boss to Migrate to Jira Service Management

You should not be afraid to propose a data migration project to your boss. Even if you tried and heard “No” or something like “We do not have enough budget for that,” keep going. That is because you could not prove the efficiency of implementing a help desk solution. Although the data import to a new service desk platform is costly and complicated, it brings great value. Below, there are seven critical steps to obtain support from your boss when suggesting such a new initiative. 

1. Prepare Your Homework

Firstly, you have to define the organizational and department objectives and ensure their alignment with your request. If needed, you can ask the boss to take a look at the support team goals and analyze the current performance. No doubt, different statistics, and numbers are more convincing compared to simple praising of help desk software’s potential value. Thus, you should qualify the current situation and demonstrate it using numbers.

2. Make an Emphasis on Value

An efficient boss is focused on business growth rather than self-actualization. Therefore, you should provide your proposal with a showcase containing:

• routine improvements;
• how to reduce tickets that fall through the cracks;
• how to reduce the support team’s workload with the knowledge base and available self-service portals;
• enhanced analysis of ticket resolution time, support team’s performance, etc.

3. Act as a Lawyer

Traditionally, C-level executives or the company’s boss are direct initiators of changes. In your case, these people will be the audience, while you will serve as the lawyer. Therefore, your main task is to demonstrate how your proposal can address the issue, impact cost savings and boost productivity.

4. Provide Your Proposal with an Indirect Advantage

After using numbers and statistics as critical arguments, you should mention some additional benefits. That includes enhanced team spirit, better job satisfaction, or decreased employee turnover.  Although such potential benefits appear intangible, they remain incredibly attractive to your executives or the boss. 

5. Be Ready to Answer Objections 

When digging into a particular topic, you learn about numerous benefits and drawbacks of service desk migration. Thus, you need to use collected information and predict potential questions or objections from your audience. But ensure that all answers are documented properly before presenting your offer. 

6. Choose the Right Time and Place

Probably, each boss has a suitable time to discuss new ideas and opportunities. So, you should determine it in his schedule and then show your proposal. Also, you must know the amount of time you have and ensure that presenting your offer will meet such time frames. 

7. Transform Your Offer into a Sales Pitch

The truth is that no one wants to get more tasks or challenges. Unfortunately, your boss and executive are not an exception. So, your suggestion must be quite polite and specific to your business requirements. You have to show your passion by explaining the possible pros of implementing a help desk solution. Finally, there is a need to demonstrate your commitment to succeeding with your initiative.

Wrap up

All initiators want to hear “yes” for their ideas and suggestions from their boss. But they must understand multiple challenges and targets their companies deal with. So, the allocation of available resources to the desired opportunities may become a bit challenging. In this case, the systematic approach to developing, presenting, and defending your idea can increase your chances of success.

Data Migration Checklist for Jira Service Management

Data migration means transferring records from one system to another. Although it sounds clear, the process usually involves changing storage and application. Thus, creating a definite plan and understanding the amount of work to perform can help avoid potential inaccuracies in the source information. Thanks to the experienced team, you can exclude the situation when migrating to Jira Service Management provokes some issues.

The important factors to prepare for successful service desk migration are:

• Arrange your in-house support team and all related processes for future migration. For example, project managers should check if all employees are on the same page with their plans, goals, and deadlines. Also, it is crucial to provide your project team, involved departments, executives, and stakeholders with updates about the process. 
• You have to carefully calculate the time frames required for preparing for the migration, conducting the switch, and testing its results. The same refers to the budget. 
• You need to know about the records’ quality and structure and audit the corporate data before the Jira Service Management migration. If you ignore this step, you can struggle with unexpected problems during the migration and testing phases. 
• Clean up the existing duplicates or redundant records. In the case of identifying some data-related problems, it is critical to address them immediately. Sometimes, that requires some additional tools or even third-party services, depending on the amount of work to complete. 
• One of the golden rules: do not forget about backing up your company’s information. That helps avoid potential loss incidents. 
• Remember to unlink your email alias, different social media profiles, and third-party app integrations from your old service desk software. 
• Provide your support team with training documentation and specific guides. Moreover, you must explain to them changes in terms, workflows, automation options, and various details on Jira Service Management ticket views. After all, getting to know the new service desk tool makes your shift easier. 
• If your clients can be impacted by the migration, you should inform them about the time frames. Moreover, there is a need to send them an email containing information about the future changes. 
• Consider the end date of your current platform subscription. Thus, you should plan your Jira Service Management migration some weeks before the next billing cycle. That will allow your organization to avoid confusion. 
• Before starting your data migration project, pay attention to Jira Service Management settings. For instance, you should check how many full licenses your support team requires. Or create custom fields if needed.

The Bottom Line

To conclude, data import and data migration involve more effort than just downloading files and double-clicking. However, migrating to Jira Service Management is efficient in terms of time and money. Here, we have provided five brief points to prove this statement:

1. Jira Service Management is an easy-to-use tool. Your support team can organize information transfer and track the available communication channels with no effort. Thus, support agents understand client issues and fix relevant tickets faster. 
2. The platform provides pricing plans with different costs and functions. So, almost every company can select an affordable toolbox that fits its business requirements. At the same time, the more you spend, the more functionality you will obtain. Also, Jira offers a free trial to get started and a free plan with limited features. 
3. Jira Service Management widgets perform for streamlined conversations, automation options, sharing files, ticket views, and various triggers. The tool supports the ITIL methodology, along with automated workflows. 
4. With Jira Service Management, your organization can develop a well-built self-service. That involves the typical FAQs section, the advanced knowledge base, and intuitive searches. Besides, the platform allows you to establish internal and external communities and round-the-clock online service portals.
5. Atlassian Marketplace is a perfect option to find numerous business tools for further integration. They include; eCommerce, social media channels, CRM systems, invoicing and accounting tools, CMS platforms, or reporting solutions. After all, Atlassian Marketplace is constantly expanding.

Jira Service Management is an appropriate service desk platform focused on small and medium-sized businesses. It offers a competitive suite of functionality on different levels. Thus, if you consider migrating information from your current service desk software, then Jira Service Management will be the right choice.

After selecting the help desk tool, you have two ways for further steps. The first requires you to convince team members to implement a service desk platform in their work operations. When you become a help desk expert, you can explain to them the significant value of such a technology. Meanwhile, the second way is to prove the advantages of Jira Service Management migration to your executives or boss. Thanks to some homework, your boss will certainly say “yes.”

Regardless of your approach to the Jira Service Management import, you should create a preparation checklist. Although the details for importing and migrating data can differ, the general essence remains the same. That includes:

• preparing the project plan, setting deadlines, and describing objectives;
• announcing the kick-off within your company;
• informing all involved about updates;
• auditing the organization’s data, backing up it, deleting duplicates and redundant records; 
• keeping your clients updated regarding the potential impact on them;
• creating guidance on Jira Service Management for your support agents;
• setting up Jira Service Management for business needs.

Both data import and data migration are costly and timely projects. Therefore, creating a well-structured plan that contains potential risks can increase the chances of success. 

Part 2. Data Import to Jira Service Management: Whats, Whys, and Hows

Part 3. What Should You Do Next After Reaching the Destination?