Automated customer support at BEMER Group with ScriptRunner for Jira

The medical technology company BEMER consistently relies on a digital setup to support customer inquiries. Through the automation of help desk functions with ScriptRunner for Jira, the efficiency of ticket processing has increased significantly - and customers are even more satisfied.

The Customer

BEMER Int. AG is one of the leading suppliers of medical technology products in the field of physical vascular therapy. Founded in 1998, BEMER is now established in over 30 countries worldwide and distributes various product lines through an extensive network of direct sales partners. Based in Triesen (Lichtenstein), the company supplies the markets in Europe and North America, among others. Since 2016, BEMER has been using the Atlassian products Jira Service Management for customer support and Jira Software for internal project management.

The Challenge

Until 2016, customer support of BEMER mainly operated through channels such as e-mail or telephone. However, with the steadily growing number of inquiries this solution was getting more and more insufficient. The new system had to be fully scalable in order to cope with the company's future growth and ensure faster and streamlined processing of customer requests. After an in-depth analysis of the status quo and advice from Scandio's consultants, the choice was made for Jira Service Management. After a structured set-up phase, the system was implemented in 2016 and has been growing consistently ever since. To date, more than 350.000 tickets have been created by over 73.000 customers worldwide.

By splitting them into specific customer portals and e-mail inboxes, all issues can be resolved systematically. Thus, the introduction of Jira Service Management enables region-specific and optimized customer support. As of today, the system can handle 150,000 tickets per year and guarantees fast and competent support for technical and medical requests.

In order to customize the large number of available workflows in Jira Service Management to fit the company's processes and to keep the maintenance costs as low as possible, it's required to automate most of these workflows. The solution here is to extend the functions of Jira Service Management with apps from third-party providers.

The Solution

In order to optimize and automate service desk processes, such as forwarding special requests to the responsible specialists, Scandio relied on the Jira add-on ScriptRunner for Jira from Adaptavist. Thanks to built-in scripts, Jira Service Management can be easily customized with individual functions so that agents can handle the system intuitively.

Through the integration of ScriptRunner, BEMER now uses more than 20 scripts and has been able to automate essential workflows for their customer service through Scandio's support.

• "Event Listener": Request participants can be automatically assigned to the respective ticket by using a specific abbreviation (corresponds to a user group). By using abbreviations, tickets can also be moved between selected projects.
• "Scripted Fields": All open tickets of the current reporter can be displayed. In addition, specific templates can be added to the description when creating new tickets and the Epic Reporter is automatically assigned as a request participant.
• "Workflow Functions": When switching to a specific workflow status, user information is displayed in a popup and dynamically filled comments are added automatically.
• "REST Endpoint": Through a series of functions, which provide certain data of projects and users (time recording, associated location, department, cost center, etc.), these can be visualized in other systems.

By introducing a multi-layered authorization concept, it was possible to display the integration of different departments in the cycle of requests. Here, a number of configured automatisms take effect as well, thus reducing the probability of errors and optimizing the process.

Project and Results

With successful project implementation, the overall process management as well as the support of end customers and partners has been clearly optimized: Old, inefficient communication channels have been replaced by an adequate Single Point of Contact for all channels. All incoming e-mails are read centrally, filtered and automatically distributed as tickets to the service desk systems. Manual procedures could thus be reduced by up to 70 percent.

At the same time, quality and speed of incident management have been further increased continuously. Currently, 32 agents process almost 5,500 requests per week for more than 10,000 BEMER customers and partners - with an average response time of just 2.2 hours.

The Future

Over the years, Jira and Jira Service Management have become the central tools for customer support and task management. At the same time, the system is far from reaching its limits at its current size.

About Adaptavist

Founded in 2005, Adaptavist is an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner and Platinum Marketplace Vendor. Adaptavist offers expert agile consultancy, apps, training, managed services, and licensing solutions to more than half of the Fortune 500. Their powerful enterprise-grade apps extend, integrate, and automate Atlassian, Slack, and many other platforms.