Before we start using Jira Service Desk, it is important to understand and familiarize ourselves with the key terminology, as follows:

• Agents: These are members of your service support team that will be working on customer requests. They are users that can perform actions such as editing, assigning, and closing requests.
• Customers: These are the end users that will be raising support requests in your service desk. These can be customers of your product, or colleagues from other departments needing IT support.
• Customer portal: This is the main landing page for your customers. It is a simple, clean, and easy-to-use front interface for your service desk, without all the extra noise from the standard Jira interface, as shown in the screenshot below:

• Queues: These are like Jira filters that show you a subset of issues that meet a certain criterion. Service desk agents use queues to prioritize and pick out requests to work on.
• Requests: These are what your end users (not agents), such as customers, submit to Jira Service Desk. Under the hood, they are just normal Jira issues. However, using the term "request" is less confusing in the context of a service desk environment. In short, requests are what your customers see, and issues are what agents see.
• Service desks: These are where customers will raise their requests. Under the hood, a service desk is a Jira project of the Service Desk project type. Please refer to Chapter 2, Using Jira for Business Projects, for more information on project types.

As shown in the following screenshot, when customers interact with requests, the user interface is very different to what agents will see. It is much simpler; the UI only displays key information about the request, such as its description and status. Customers cannot make changes to the request details, and can only add new comments or attachments to the request:

The key information regarding service desks is as follows:

• Request type: This represents the different types of request customers can make. These can be anything, including a problem report, help request, or general inquiry. When you create a new request type, Jira creates a new issue type behind the scenes. One major feature of the request type is that it allows you to specify a user-friendly name for it. While the actual issue type is called Problem Report, you can rename it and display it as Submit a problem report instead.
• Service desk: This is what agents will be working from. Each service desk has a front, customer-facing portal. Behind the scenes, a service desk is a Jira project controlled by Jira permissions, workflows, and other schemes.
• SLA: SLA defines the quality of service that is being guaranteed to your customers. In Jira Service Desk, SLAs are measured in time, such as response time and overall time taken to resolve issues.