How to use Customer data to turbo charge the service experience

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Working in Service Management is a game of quick decision-making. The number of applications and data is growing, your workforce is more volatile and distributed than ever, and your customers expect consumer-grade service in all aspects of their lives. Making customer data readily available for agents enables them to form good decisions fast in a hectic work environment and bridges the challenges of remote work, distributed teams, and variances in individual skill sets and experience.

The trick is to source, manage, and utilize customer data wisely. In this article, we explore the needs, impediments, and solutions for providing accurate, consistent, and timely data to turbocharge the service experience for customers.

Finding and using reliable customer data is still a huge problem

A lot of business processes can be managed in Jira and Jira Service Management. Couple this with Assets, available in Jira Service Management Premium, and it takes you even further. The fact is, however, that many companies today utilize additional tools like Hubspot or Salesforce for marketing and sales activities, keep track of devices in Intune or Jamf, store users, teams and departments in Azure AD (Entra ID), Okta or Google Workspace, and using Datadog to monitor services or store licenses and modules in another database.

Finding the data to support quick decisions properly is still too hard work. According to Gartner, in their study released May 2023:

• Nearly 50% of employees say they struggle to find the information they need to complete work.
• 32% of respondents said a lack of awareness over key information led them to make a wrong decision

The application landscape is growing quickly. According to Gartner, in the same study, the number of applications we need to perform our work has increased nearly 100% in 4 years.

Accept the application abundance, unleash your data

The ambition of many of the monster master data initiatives back in the days was to create a central master data repository. A logical solution, as double entry of data is a waste of time that poses a risk of data inaccuracy, however these ambitious initiatives very seldom got to the finish line, leaving data silos behind. Some of the data is in one silo, some is in the next, and of course, a lot of data is duplicated in both. As Gartner points out, we are constantly expanding our catalog of digital tools, as they offer value in different ways.

We need to rid ourselves of the idea that all the customer master data need to be stored in one central application. Customer master data should certainly be centrally managed but can be distributed. You don’t need to buy yet another tool for the sole purpose of storing and distributing customer data. Accept the fact that your customer data is distributed. Instead, use the energy to draw up policies and routines around the data to ensure accuracy and use connectors to integrate your applications.

360 view of the customer data will make your service management best in class

Agents working in Jira Service Management should not need to step out of the tickets to go find information in another application. Agents should not need to know where to look for the data. As you scale your business or face workforce turnovers you will need to serve new coworkers with solid customer intel to get them quickly into productivity.

When a customer reports an incident or requests a service, we want to serve the agent with customer context information like:

• Who in sales can I talk to about this customer's service?
• How much revenue does this customer generate for our company?
• Are sales working on an opportunity with this customer?
• Did the customer respond to the last webinar about the newly released feature?
• Has the customer been contacted about a campaign?
• What version of your software is running in the customer environment?
• What modules of your software are used in the customer environment?

Quick access to information like this will enable service management agents to make better decisions faster.

In the below picture, the Jira Service Management request is enriched with Company details, Contact person details, and an active Opportunity from Salesforce

JSM ticket with Customer - Contacts - Opportunity object custom fields

Start with getting data into the formation

It might be a good idea to look at customer data from a systems thinking approach. Get yourself an overview by asking yourself the questions:

1. Where is the action happening? List your applications in which you interact with customers.
2. Where is your data located today? Identify the sources where your customer data is stored.
3. What are your agents needs? Aim for just enough customer data points available where the action happens. If your customer reports incidents in Jira Service Management, the necessary customer data to support request resolution should be visible there.
4. Form rules of engagement: For each data point, define the master and replica and how often they should sync.
5. Form data quality policies, regulations, and routines.

This might seem like an insurmountable task, similar to the gigantic master data projects of old days, but a lot of things has changed over the years. Technically, integrating data has never been easier. The Pio Importers let you import and sync data from many different applications. Setting them up should not take longer than 5 minutes!

Integrating data has never been easier

The Pio Importers are built on Atlassian Forge and let you import and sync data from many other applications. Connecting other tools to Assets in Jira takes less than 5 minutes.

Data residency support is available on Forge-hosted apps. This means you can PIN all the data stored by Pio Applications to your preferred location.

In Assets, you choose whether the importer should place the external assets in an existing schema or create a dedicated schema. The app serves you with the data model from the source to get you going quickly.

How to get going with Importer apps

1. Download the apps via the Atlassian Marketplace
2. Follow the instructions on the Configuration checklist by Pio to configure the app
   • the source (Salesforce, Hubspot, your special Database...)
   • the destination (Jira)
   • the import (first full import and then on the schedule of your choice)
3. Create Asset object fields in Jira and build automation rules to start displaying the data for the Agents

Example integrations

HubSpot Importer for JSM Assets lets you create and sync Companies, Contacts, Deals, Products, Quotes, Line Items, Tickets, Users, and Owners from the Hubspot CRM.

Salesforce (CRM) Importer for JSM Assets lets you create and sync Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Campaigns, and Partners from your Salesforce instance.

Database Importer for JSM Assets allows you to bring in all the crucial data you need for a better customer service from your MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL databases.

Value of having customer data in sync

Ensuring that your service management employees struggle less to find accurate data and are empowered to make good decisions faster. Making customer data available to the Jira Service Management agents will enable you to:

• Improve the collaboration between different roles working with the same customer
• Add related users as request participants to get information about Jira Requests concerning their shared customer
• Tailor the service to each customer
• Improve the customer experience
• Use the customer ratings from other sources in controlling Jira Service Management SLA’s
• Save time for the Jira Service Management agent by presenting just enough customer context data on the requests.
• Get new Jira Service Management agents quickly up to speed as data is automatically presented to them.

Hakan Bahadir

Pio