What are service project customers and organizations?

Customers are people who request help from your service project. Jira Service Management converts requests that customers raise into issues for your agents to work on.

Depending on the customer access settings on your site, you might have customers in the form of customers of your company, employees at your company, or both.

Learn about which account is best for your customers

External customers

Also known as portal-only customers, these are typically people who seek help relating to the use of your company’s products or services. They can:

• have portal-only accounts

• access help centers on your site

• send requests from help centers or via email

• view knowledge base articles in help centers

• not access Atlassian products (no product licenses consumed)

• be configured to use SAML single sign-on to access your help centers.

Internal customers

Also known as your employee customers, these people are most likely employees at your company or partners that need internal support from your teams, for example, a new employee who needs their IT workstation set up. In addition to all the benefits of a portal-only account, they can:

• have Atlassian accounts (with the product role of ‘Customer’ on your site)

• collaborate across multiple Atlassian products using the same account

• access your help centers for free, if no product access is assigned to them

• be configured to use SAML single sign-on or be a member of the traditional user groups

• (optional) be licensed to use your Atlassian cloud products, for example, Jira, Jira Service Management and Confluence. Learn more about updating product access settings.

Organizations

Organizations are groups of customers that are shared across service projects. Learn more about grouping customers into organizations.

Agents can remove customers from an organization so they lose access to service projects that use the organization. Learn more about removing customers from an organization.