Providing technical support is an unavoidable part of the modern IT professional’s work, but much of the time spent handling service requests nowadays is wasted on unnecessary drudgery that can be automated with the right tooling. Atlassian Inc. hopes to fill the role with the new iteration of its ticketing software that debuted this morning, which introduces improved search functionality meant to tackle two of the biggest resource drains on enterprise contact centers.

First and foremost is the need to field common questions already covered by self-service support content. Knowledge bases hosted on JIRA Service Desk can now take advantage of autocomplete functionality borrowed from the consumer world that provides search suggestions as a user types a query in order to increase their chances of uncovering the desired article. Individuals with more difficult problems that require manual intervention will be able to find help faster as well thanks to a new machine learning algorithm included under the hood that make it easier to search for contact lines.

If, as an example, the system finds that employees who make queries containing the word “printer” most often end up send a ticket to their organization’s internal hardware support unit, then JIRA Service Desk will reorganize the results for that term to show the department’s contact details information at the top. The functionality addresses the other major time sink that Atlassian has set out to tackle: misfiled troubleshooting requests. With that too out of the way, agents will be able to spend more of their time addressing end-users’ most pressing technical issues, a process that the new release hopes to speed as well with a new automated notification function.

JIRA Service Desk can now be configured to instantly alert every user who has filed a complaint over a particular backend issue when it’s solved without any manual input. The feature kills two birds with one stone and avoids the need for support representatives to send out hundreds of duplicate messages after every such outage while enabling the employees on the receiving end to get back to work faster. Atlassian hopes that the new functionality in the release will make JIRA Service Desk more competitive against arch-rival Zendesk Inc., which offers a similar set of capabilities for automating ticket management.

Image via Geralt