Use chat and video tools to resolve incidents as a team

Communicating successfully is one of the most important steps in leading to the effective resolution of an incident. When an incident arises, you need to know who to communicate to, how to reach them, and how to do it with the least friction and fewest resources possible, in order to avoid a customer service nightmare or communication meltdown.

One of the first things an incident manager will do when they come online is set up the incident team's communication channels. The goal at this early stage of an incident is to establish and focus all incident communications in well-known places, such as: 

• chat channels in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a different messaging service

• video chats in a conference call or in a physical room

Video chat is great for building a shared mental picture of the incident quickly through a group discussion. While chat channels help generate a timestamped record of the incident, along with collected links to screenshots, URLs, and dashboards that you can use alongside the activity feed of an incident to resolve the issue – and, later, to complete the post-incident review. Learn more about using the activity feed to learn from your incidents.

Chat channels for incident management

Jira Service Management’s integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams enable your team to collaborate during incidents using chat channels, and take actions such as adding responders, updating incident priority and assignee to help your team step in faster when an incident occurs.

When dealing with an incident, you can access chat channels by selecting Create channel or Open [channel name] in the Details section of the incident issue view.

With these integrations, you can also:

• create a new chat channel from the issue view of an incident

• automatically invite incident responders and stakeholders to the chat channel

• view incident details from the chat channel

• take actions on the incident from the chat channel.

Learn how to connect a new Slack workspace to your service project or learn how to connect Microsoft Teams to your service project.

Conference calls for incident management

The Incident Command Center is a video and voice call tool that allows you and your team to swarm on major incidents, and communicate easily and directly with relevant teams so that you can resolve major incidents as soon as possible.

Access conference calls directly from Jira Service Management in an incident by selecting Join call or Start call using the Conference call field in the Details section of the incident. Learn how to create or join a conference call in Jira Service Management.

Jira Service Management’s inbuilt conference calls allow you to:

• create or join a conference call from the issue view of an incident.

• use video and live chat to swarm on an incident.

• keep an eye on incident activity with a real-time activity stream.

• invite responders and stakeholders to the call.

• complete incident actions such as adding responders.

Learn more about using conference calls to swarm on incidents in Jira Service Management.