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 channel in Slack or another messaging service

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

Video chat is great for building a shared mental picture of the incident quickly through group discussion, while using a chat channel can 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

With Jira Service Management’s Slack integration, you can use Slack to collaborate during incidents. By connecting Slack workspaces, you can create Slack chat channels for your incidents, add incident responders to your Slack channels, update incident priorities, take incident actions, and help your team step in faster when an incident occurs.

You can access Slack when dealing with an incident by selecting ‘Create channel’ or ‘Open [#channel name]’ using the Chat channel field in the Details section of the issue view.

Jira Service Management’s Slack connection also enables you to:

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

• automatically invite incident responders and stakeholders to the channel

• view incident details from the Slack channel

• take actions on the incident from the Slack channel

Learn more about enabling Slack in Jira Service Management.

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, helping you to 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 issue view. Learn how to create or join a conference call in Jira Service Management.

Jira Service Management’s inbuilt conference calls allows 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.