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.

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 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.

Slack

Here’s everything you can do with Jira Service Management’s Slack integration:

• Create Slack channels from the issue view of an incident.

• Add incident responders and stakeholders the Slack channel.

• Get a summary of the incident sent to the Slack channel.

• Take actions on the incident from the Slack channel, like resolving, closing, and updating incident priority.

Learn how to connect a new Slack workspace to your service project.

Microsoft Teams

Here’s everything you can do with Jira Service Management’s Microsoft Teams integration:

• Create Teams chats and meetings from the issue view of an incident.

• Add incident responders to the Teams chat and meeting.

• View all incident details in the chat and meeting.

• Update the incident priority and assign the incident to yourself from the chat.

• Add chat messages from Teams as internal notes to the incident or as a reply to the customer.

Learn how to connect Microsoft Teams to your service project.

Conference calls for incident management

Jira Service Management’s Incident Command Center is an inbuilt video and voice call tool that allows you and your team to swarm on major incidents, communicate easily and directly with relevant teams so that you can resolve major incidents as soon as possible.

You can 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.