Hi there,

Thanks so much for your patience.

We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing problems and have updated the Jira Service Desk behaviour starting from version 4.7.0 to prioritise Agent role when the Agent also acts as a Customer Organization member or the Approver for the purposes of SLA events and Automation. Request Participants and Reporters will remain to be treated as customers primarily.

The notification part of the issue mentioned here has been addressed by releasing a more detailed Knowledge Base article: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/enabling-notifications-for-agents-acting-as-customers-987144325.html

Thank you,

The Jira Service Desk Team

If this becomes yet another Atlassian Graveyard undead request, living 10+ years withought the 1-2hrs of fix time it probably requires, our workaround is to use filters and subscriptions set by inviduals. Our filter is simply something like: project = ITSD AND Approvals = myPending()

Another impact of this treatment (extends to people who have been added as participants) is that any SLA that is tied to the agent adding a comment to the ticket will fail, as the SLA will see this agents response as being a customer response, not a response to the customer! We have lots of SLA "failures" as the customer shared the issue with the agent and the SLA timer did not stop when the agent left a response.

Same situation for us....please go ahead with this issue!!!

Very much looking forward to seeing this resolved, we have a number of workflows where the approver is usually an agent, and having duplicate customer+agent notifications does not work well for this 

This is a major issue for us as well. Our current solution is to implement a different approval process. It's very disappointing.

One of our senior agents is also the final approver for issues. We cannot have a situation where the agent approver is not receiving notifications on the ticket. This seems more like a bug than a suggestion.

Big issue for us also. I fully agree with @Björn Gullanders comment:

 
Since most organisations that I know of, use both internal users (agents) and customers as approvers this behaviour is not acceptable. The whole approval functionality can not be used as we cannot trust that agents get their notifications.  

An agent is an agent, a customer is a customer and an approver might be any of them. 

Big issue for my users also.  Any update on this?

We implemented this system and it became the sole method in our organisation for approvals for HR forms and processes. We are a global company with approvals required from multiple locations. This should be such a useful system, and we anticipated that it would make approvals easier. In fact, its created more issues as now approvers cannot receive emails. Now we are receiving lots of angry emails asking why the system doesn't work. Very frustrating that the approvals system will not inform approvers they need to approve something. 

In the meanwhile, we now have to check every ticket and add the approvers as request participants. Its hugely inconvenient, but at least they can approve this way.

We are also suffering greatly from this as we cannot get all customers to click the Approve button, so an agent adds herself to Approver so she can see and click the Approve button, but then she stops getting all internal notifications. The agent is in the service-desk-agents group, not service-desk-users, so should always be considered an agent.

Actually, there is another component to this and that is if an agent is the Reporter they also do not get any internal mail. An agent can remove herself from Approver, but in our implementation we need Reporter to be immutable so there is no solution making this more serious.

Since most organisations that I know of, use both internal users (agents) and customers as approvers this behaviour is not acceptable. The whole approval functionality can not be used as we cannot trust that agents get their notifications.  

An agent is an agent, a customer is a customer and an approver might be any of them. 

I am not getting notified when I'm an agent and an approver. This is really an astonishing behavior of the software. Every now and then I have to go manually over each issue in order to check if a customer has responded to my questions.

If they are JIRA licensed customers you can set filters to remind them they have approvals waiting. This is a major issue when the person needing to approve something is just another service desk customer. There is NO WAY to remind that person they have an approval waiting if they miss the initial email.

This needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Our security organization is not getting responses by our internal customers, which leads to major misunderstandings!

How can you not remind approvers that they need to approve something? Whoever designed this feature has magical customers that never forget things or miss emails...

It doesn't even have to be a customizable reminder, it could simply resend the initial email about an approval waiting on a schedule.

Major oversight.

We recently discovered that some users/agents in our organization are affected by this, and are not getting notifications for Service Desk tickets that they are approvers on. Our solution is to create a new admin user specifically for purposes of approvals, but it's not ideal since we're going to be throwing money at the problem as a fix until it is resolved.