Thomas Verschoren

You could setup a ZAPIER flow that creates a Zendesk problem ticket each time a new JIRA issue is created by a Developer in your company? 

Flow would be:

• A Developer creates a JIRA issue
• Based on specific conditions (e.g. issue has tag "Zendesk" or "customer related") trigger a Zapier flow that creates a new Problem ticket in Zendesk
• A team lead links the problem ticket to the Jira issue (via the free Zendesk to Jira integration)
• A customer agent gets a new ticket
• They look through the active problems to see if something is related.
• If so, they link the ticket as an incident to the problem ticket
• If not, they raise a new issue via the Jira integration?

Might be a bit to complex, but might work.

There's a couple of ways you can approach this:

SLA

My preferred way is working with SLAs to make sure VIP tickets appear higher in the list than regular tickets, while still making sure every ticket hits their respective SLA.

I do this by creating two SLA policies:

SLA - default - all tickets

• first reply time: 4h/8h for urgent/normal
• next reply time: 8h/8h for urgent/normal

SLA - VIP - organization is tagged with VIP

• first reply time: 2h/4h for urgent/normal
• next reply time: 4h/4h for urgent/normal

The benefit of using SLA is your agents can still have a single view with active tickets while not neglecting other users.

Messaging

When it comes to messaging I would work with SSO and pro-active messaging.
You can trigger a different intent based on the user logged in, so you know a VIP always gets a proactive message and a different bot experience than another user.
See a demo here: https://proactive.internalnote.com (menu Contact and Contact VIP).

Zendesk App

and finally I would write a simple Zendesk app that looks at the current user and if they contain the tag VIP we show a popup top right.

I wrote a quick version of the app, available here as a private app. You can find the latest version in the TMP folder.
https://github.com/verschoren/vip_alerts

(Support article on how to install it can be found here)

Note that the new Essentials Card in Zendesk can also clearly shows the VIP status of user)