Managing customers

JIRA Service Desk customers are users who create requests for the service team to work on. They do not have access to the service desk interface in JIRA used by agents. Customers do not consume JIRA Service Desk licenses or JIRA user licenses. Customers can:

• Create requests and track their own requests
• Add comments to their own requests

Every customer must have an account to create requests. They need to log in to use the Customer Portal. When customers contact your service desk with the email channel for the first time, new user accounts will automatically be created for them if public signup is enabled. If the service desk does not allow public signup, emails sent by unregistered email addresses are not processed. 

Managing customers and their requests

You can find customers and the requests they created in your service desk by using the Customers section of the People tab. We refer to this section as the customer list. The list shows twenty customers at most. You can search for customers that do not appear on the list.

To look at requests created by a customer, use the Open requests and Closed requests columns on the list. 

Screenshot: Customer list on the People tab

Adding customers

There are a number of ways to add customers to your service desk. 

Allowing customers to sign up for user accounts

Public signup allows your customers to create accounts themselves. As new customers sign up, they will be added to your service desk's customer list.

To enable public signup, see Configuring public signup.

Adding customers to your service desk manually

To add customers manually:

1. In your service desk, go to the People tab > Customers. 
2. Click the Invite customers button, and enter the email addresses of the customers. 
   Note: Mailing lists do not work.

Invited customers will then receive an email invitation that links them to your Customer Portal. They can log in to your portal if their email already exists in the system, or they will need to fill in details for their account and set the password after landing on the portal. 

Customers are added as members of the Service Desk Customers role automatically after you invite them to your service desk.

Adding customers to your service desk by groups with the project role

You can add groups of customers by adding them to the Service Desk Customers project role.

1. Open the service desk in the administration console, go to Administration > Projects.
2. Choose your service desk.
3. Open the Roles section
4. Review the Service Desk Customers role and update the Groups field. Enter one or multiple JIRA user groups of your choice and click Update.

The users in the groups you added will then have access to your service desk.