How Thumbtack saves time and 60% in costs using automation in Jira Service Management
Through Atlassian’s Jira Service Management, Thumbtack automated workflows, cut costs, and empowered teams, freeing up time for high-impact work and boosting employee satisfaction.
This blog is adapted from the Team ’25 session, “How Thumbtack achieved next-level automation.”
Thumbtack has helped millions of homeowners tackle their to-do lists, connecting them with professionals for everything from dog grooming to plumbing. They are home to 500 service categories, 300,000 professionals, and more than 80 million projects started. Headquartered in San Francisco and operating globally, Thumbtack remains a scrappy, tight-knit team and a leader in the home management space.
But as Thumbtack grew, so did the complexity of its internal to-dos. Manual processes and limited integrations with their previous tool (Zendesk) were hindering that growth and slowing teams down. “Hiring is always tight. Budgets are tight. We needed to scale efficiently without adding headcount,” explained Chris Bocage, Thumbtack’s Director of IT Operations.
Building for scale: If you build it, they will come
In early 2023, Thumbtack switched from Zendesk to Jira Service Management. Their journey started with IT, but quickly expanded beyond. Today they have expanded their use of Jira Service Management in product and operations teams, and run 25 service desks and counting across the company. Teams from HR, payroll, legal, accounts payable and more, leverage Jira Service Management to streamline and speed up their service.
At a glance results with Jira Service Management
- 60% cost savings from day one
- SLA compliance jumped to 90%, improving both resolution and response times.
- 180 hours saved per month
- 15% of tickets automatically resolved with Jira Service Management’s virtual service agent.
- CSAT scores soared to 4.94/5
Thumbtack focuses on automation and integration, setting out to automate the most common applications, remove manual monotony, give time back to employees, and be nimble and effective with the right staffing and technology.
For instance, instead of the time-consuming work manually adding users to apps, Thumbtack built automated workflows that handle approvals, provisioning, and notifications. Employees can request access to an application from Slack or a service desk, automation notifies the relevant application owner, the owner approves the request, and access is automatically provisioned via an Okta integration. This frees IT from being a bottleneck, resulting in more productive teams and employees.
More time for what matters
In their first year using Jira Service Management, Thumbtack fully automated 623 tickets—about 10% of their annual volume. This improved employee morale and satisfaction, and allows IT and other service teams to spend less time on repetitive tasks, and more on complex, high-impact projects. Chris explained his team is “feeling challenged in their day-to-day roles, versus just doing the same repetitive task over and over.“
Thumbtack gave their teams the freedom to focus on what matters most, and improve their employee experiences. By using Jira Service Management they accomplished more with less.
For more on how Thumbtack is making the most of Jira Service Management, check out their customer story or the recent webinar AI in Service Management: New Data Separates Hype vs Reality.