Disable portal automatic responses about status change on the customer portal under Activity
Platform Notice: Cloud - This article applies to Atlassian products on the cloud platform.
Summary
When an admin disables the customer notification Customer-visible status changed for a JSM project, no notifications are triggered for customer, however the status change history is still reflected on the customer portal. Currently, on the customer portal view there is no way to disable automatic responses when an issue transition through different status during its lifecycle. This creates a lot of messages on the portal view which makes it an unpleasant experience for customers to scroll through to see the actual updates.
We have an open feature request JSDCLOUD-5981 - Disable portal automatic responses based on customer notifications settings to improve this functionality. Sharing a workaround as part of this kb to help reduce some of these unnecessary messages.
Cause
The "customer visible" status messages are produced from the issue activity. The activity messages for statuses are always triggered when a request changes its "customer-visible" status.
Solution
Admins can decide what workflow status will be visible to reduce multiple status change activity. The suggestion it to set a single customer facing name for multiple status that are not necessary for customer to have visibility about. This will hide the unnecessary status as well as status transitions from the customer. The document Customize the workflow statuses for a request type will help you with the steps to set a customer facing name for workflow status.
- For example, let's say here is how your workflow looks like for a "Request a new software". Once a request is raised, lets say you don't want the customer to see status like Waiting for support, Waiting for customer, Pending, Reopen but just indicate to the customer that their request is in progress.
- To achieve this from project settings, navigate to the Request types > click on the request type name you want to apply these changes to > Click on the "Workflow statues" tab:
- Set the Status name to show customer as "In progress" for all the 3 workflow status: Waiting for support, Waiting for customer, Pending, Reopen and click on Save:
In doing so transitions performed by agents between "Waiting on customer" and "Waiting on support" should no longer trigger activity messages in the portal, as the status did not change in any way visible to the customer (i.e., the statuses appear the same).
NOTE:
For company-managed projects, the customers would still see activity messages for the resolution field being set.
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