How Thumbtack automatically resolves 15% of tickets with AI and saves 60% on tooling with Jira Service Management

Making life easier for homeowners and employees

Thumbtack started in 2008 with a simple question: Why is it so hard to hire a plumber? 

Since then, the company has helped millions of people care for and improve their homes, empowering local professionals to turn their talents into thriving businesses. Every day, in every county of the U.S., people turn to Thumbtack to connect with and hire a growing community of 300,000 local service businesses.

For employees, working at Thumbtack means being part of a dynamic culture built on integrity, inclusion, and authenticity. Fittingly, Director of IT Operations Chris Bocage and Director of IT Infrastructure Jason Kuo had a vision for elevating Thumbtack’s service management. 

Beyond helping their own teams increase efficiency, they wanted to implement IT service management (ITSM) processes that would empower Thumbtack’s entire workforce. That meant moving away from their legacy internal service management tool, in favor of a solution that could streamline work with more advanced integrations, automations, and AI capabilities. 

Jira Service Management was Thumbtack’s chosen solution. Today, 20+ teams across the company use Jira Service Management for their internal service desks, leveraging two-way integrations with other platforms, like Slack, to get more done with less tool switching.

With the virtual service agent, Jira Service Management’s generative-AI powered assistant, Thumbtack is taking those results to the next level. Now, their IT team has assistance from what Chris describes as a “global, 24/7 helping hand.” 

Thumbtack’s vision: streamlined service management, integrated with existing workflows

Chris and Jason knew automations and integrations were a crucial lever needed to achieve their goal: optimize ITSM processes to make life easier for all of Thumbtack’s people. 

Their prior tool had the basic capabilities they needed to converse with requesters and resolve tickets, but it didn’t integrate fully with the rest of Thumbtack’s operations. “It was more of a point-to-point ticketing system,” says Chris. “Its ability to integrate, automate, and connect to other tools and processes was very limited.”

While there were basic integrations with tools like Slack and Jira, the legacy tool simply shared a link to the ticket and didn’t offer the ability to track progress. That added complexity to the service management process, with multiple ticket queues for different projects. 

Rather than constantly hopping in and out to move tickets forward, Chris and his team wanted to embed their new solution into existing workflows to simplify the process for both agents and requesters. That would require stronger, two-way integrations so people could solve problems without leaving their everyday productivity tools.

Chris knew the longer they stayed with a tool that didn’t fit their needs, the more Thumbtack would be missing out. “We wanted something that was more robust, but we just hadn’t found the right fit,” he says. “As we looked for a replacement, we asked ourselves: ‘What boring, repetitive things can we automate out of the way?’” 

Reducing annual tooling costs by 60% with Jira Service Management’s integrated, AI-powered solution

Thumbtack had been using Atlassian tools since 2015, with an ecosystem including Confluence, Jira, and Statuspage. As they looked to transition away from their prior service management tool, they were interested in Atlassian’s seamless integrations and powerful workflows. “We love how additive Jira Service Management is,” shares Jason. “It's a full-featured ITSM solution that we can trust equally on the software side.” 

In May 2022, Thumbtack switched to Jira Service Management for their main internal IT service desk – a move that reduced annual tooling costs by over $60,000 for the same number of licenses (a 60% savings). After seeing Jira Service Management’s immediate impact, the team decided to bring it to business teams too. 

Today, Thumbtack uses Jira Service Management for ITSM needs spanning service request, change, incident, problem, knowledge, and asset management. Over 20 teams across the company (including HR, Accounting, and Finance) have adopted the tool, with even more getting started in the near future. 

Eliminating repetitive processes and tool switching

With integrations and automations, Jira Service Management creates a faster, more intuitive work experience. 

Jira Service Management’s automations expedite repetitive processes, like sending auto-replies, setting appropriate SLAs, and moving tickets between help desks. Jira Service Management expedites the handling of nearly every ticket to some degree, whether it’s by using end-to-end automation, or by streamlining agent processes with robust integrations.

For example, by integrating Jira Service Management with Okta and Workday, Thumbtack has almost completely automated onboarding and offboarding requests. The IT Team receives over 1,000 of these requests annually, so they are on track to save as much as 250 hours every year. 

These workflows improve productivity and the experience for all stakeholders by reducing tool switching and supporting deep focus. “It's been a huge efficiency gain for our brains,” says Jason. “I'm not going from tool to tool to look for what I need.” 

Holistic IT project visibility for agents

Within IT, team members have used one particular integration to restructure workflows for even greater efficiency: Jira Service Management’s connection with Jira, which IT uses for project and product management. That means employees can use either tool to create Jira tasks related to service requests (which are automatically organized into queues for different projects), track progress across projects, and manage tickets – all without switching tools. 

“Perhaps the biggest efficiency gain for us has been having everything together under one roof,” says Jason. “Now, our tracking of each project in Jira, including OKRs, is linked to all Jira Service Management tickets relevant to that project.”

Atlassian Intelligence and the virtual service agent: “a global, 24/7 helping hand”

For Thumbtack’s IT Team, Atlassian Intelligence has enabled a fundamental shift in their time management, multiplying the value they saw after switching to Jira Service Management. 

After onboarding to Jira Service Management, IT immediately jumped into Early Access Programs to test drive Atlassian Intelligence features, including the virtual service agent. “Setting up the virtual [service] agent was seamless – a couple clicks and integrations, plus a test of the environment and intents,” says Lead IT Operations Engineer Twan Huynh.

Thumbtack began by rolling out the virtual service agent for their main internal IT service desk, by far their busiest one, which is managed by ten people spread across different time zones. Originally, the idea was to work towards 24-hour availability by geographically distributing agents. But with the virtual service agent, that’s no longer needed since requests are still addressed on weekends, holidays, and any time employees aren’t on call.

“The virtual [service] agent is like a global, 24/7 helping hand,” says Chris. “When you’re in a leadership position, it helps you rest easy knowing that some resolutions can be handled even when we're not available.”

Virtual service agent in action: automation and conversation through Slack makes life easier

Before Jira Service Management, employees were losing time and breaking focus switching between tools to request or provide support. 

For example, Thumbtack’s prior tool offered a limited Slack integration, so team members had to open the tool to manage each request. Now with Jira Service Management’s virtual service agent, employees can ask for help and solve problems directly through the #AskIT Slack channel. Plus, IT no longer needs to manually monitor the busy channel themselves.

Today when employees raise a request or ask a question in Slack, the virtual service agent tries to automatically resolve it using pre-defined troubleshooting flows or AI answers, which search Thumbtack’s knowledge base and surface relevant findings within the original Slack message. 

When automatic resolution isn’t possible, the virtual service agent creates a Jira Service Management ticket and includes all context gathered during the conversation between the virtual service agent and requester. 

Deflecting 15% of requests with automations and “smarter processes that work better”

Thumbtack has now fully automated two kinds of requests to save time for everyone: 

• General knowledge requests, using virtual service agent AI answers to generate a response based on relevant articles from their knowledge base in Confluence

• Access requests, using virtual service agent intent flows to direct employees to the right form and automatically assigning permissions through an Okta integration

By automating these types of requests, the virtual service agent is already handling 15% of all requests without human involvement. Subsequently, IT has increased their SLA compliance from 90% to 95%. 

The team not only has more capacity for more complex requests, but also more energy to dedicate to optimization and innovation. “Instead of responding to questions manually, we're spending our time on making our knowledge base better,” says Systems Engineer Angela Streeter. “It’s a shift in how we’re spending our time. We’re building smarter processes that work better for us in the long term.”  

Making ITSM as easy as booking a plumber

Thanks to Jira Service Management’s integrations and automations, data is no longer siloed across different platforms, and teams aren’t constantly switching tools. As a result, IT has more time, energy, and budget to invest in meaningful work and provide great service. 

With Jira Service Management, Thumbtack’s main IT help desk has saved the team around 80 hours per month, the equivalent of 10 workdays. Across the nine other service desks, they’re saving an additional 100 hours (or 12 workdays) per month.  

Thumbtack’s teams built the company’s reputation on connecting homeowners and qualified service providers. With Jira Service Management, they’re making progress toward that mission. In fact, customer satisfaction scores are 4.9/5. 

Equally importantly, Thumbtack's tools are now making employees’ lives easier too. “I like to think in terms of win-win situations,” shares Jason. “Jira Service Management helps all Thumbtack employees. If we can get them something faster, without hands-on effort, that makes everyone happier. There’s a cascading effect of wins, right down to the customer. So when someone needs a new faucet, they can get it more easily.”