Customer database

George_hj3dhm

Hi,

I'm totally new to Atlassian, so please excuse me if I'm asking a totally obvious or frequently asked question: How does Jira handle customer information? Are there any best practices?

Background: We're a new/small software developer and I've been looking at using the Atlassian suite for our needs: BitBucket for Source code, Jira Software for tracking development issues, features & releases, Jira Service Desk as a helpdesk for customer facing issues. I'd hoped that Jira Service Desk and Jira Core would share the same customer database so we could use Jira Core for marketing and sales purposes.

From what I've seen so far, it looks like Service Desk and Core projects have independent lists of customers and customer info is limited to just an email address. I was hoping to keep a record of sales info e.g. subscription ID, expiry date etc.

Am I barking up the wrong tree with my expectations, or have I missed something obvious?

Max Foerster - K15t

Hi George and welcome to the community! You're not barking up the wrong tree at all! What you're trying to achieve is perfectly possible with the tools, you just have to customize them according to your needs. That's their advantage: They are pretty powerful. And that's their biggest disadvantage, too.  

Let me take your example about Jira Service Desk and Core. Jira Service Desk offers native support for a user type "customer". That is important for the way it works or how it provides your service of product support (or internal self-service for example).

Customers get access to the help center (sum of all service portals) and service portals (one per project) to raise requests, access a connected knowledge base (Confluence) and so on. On the other side are so-called Service Desk agents working on requests and other internal users (not agents) that can collaborate (for example comment) on requests.

Jira Core does not offer the distinctive feature of "customers". At least it is not called that way. But you could create such an access level working with permissions. It all depends on your requirements. Let me give you a (very, very) brief outline of how my team works with customer data and support.

We have an independent Jira instance serving as CRM (pulling data from the Atlassian Marketplace) and storing everything that is related to licenses, customers, etc in a "License" issue type. Which then contains "Transactions" as sub-tasks. But that Jira is enriched with lots of custom fields and calculated/scripted fields for summing up values and displaying other needed data we defined at some point. Don't forget enhanced reporting and charts as well.

And our Jira Service Desk (a different instance in our case but it doesn't have to be that way) is used for support and can access that data as well to display license details and other useful information in requests. For Marketing Jira is hooked up to a well-known email marketing solution.

So you have a steep learning curve ahead of you if you just came across the tools. But it will be fun.

I would suggest starting with Jira for managing your team's work and then expand from there. Or reach out to a solution partner and let them help you set everything up. It will be fun but it's not done in a day.

Best, Max