How to better manage your client support in Jira Service Management by using a Salesforce integrator

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More and more companies are using Jira Service Management to provide a support portal to customers or internally for employees. Let's take a common example: an IT portal. When a customer raises a ticket from a Jira Service Management portal the support agent will need some information from the owner of the ticket. S/he could need additional contacts, deals, products or services they bought, language preferences, or level of support they bought. Gathering this type of information requires support agents to go searching, and results in a loss of time for both agent and customer. 

Customer details and information is often already stored in a CRM, such as Salesforce. At Elements, we provide a Jira Salesforce connector solution: Element Connect for Jira Server & Data Center. 

We'll look at what it does in more details in the section below, then we'll see it in action for an ITSM use case.

Use Elements Connect for Jira Server & Data Center in Jira to bring in Salesforce data 

Elements Connect work as a Jira Salesforce connector, and is configured by Jira admins who create custom fields that query Salesforce. Support agents using Jira in their day to day work will have the new  external data available in the custom fields of the requests they work on. The application is designed to handle any datasource, such as SQL database, LDAP database, REST API, etc. According to our customers, some of the best features of Elements Connect are:

• The possibility to choose between a "live" field that gets its value in real time and a "snapshot" field that updates its value only once, such as when creating an issue.
• Customize how data is displayed in Jira tickets.
• The connected fields can be used for Jira Service Management.

If you want to learn more about Elements Connect connectivity and features, there are plenty of tutorials and examples in our documentation.

Data sources synchronization provided by Elements Connect

Use Case:  Managing customer requests, incidents, and change requests

Client data is probably the heart of your business, and Jira Service Management shouldn't be cut off from this data. Adding the Salesforce CRM information to support tickets gives agents access to key information about a customer without having to go and search through Salesforce. 

When we are working on a support activity we are always keeping an eye on the resolution time of a ticket so we respect the service level agreement (SLA). Fetching contact information from your Salesforce CRM will help you resolve tickets faster. This will eliminate the need for agents to ask customers to confirm details or go searching for it in Salesforce, two actions which don't contribute to the actual support actions carried out by the agent. The role of a support agent is to recreate the customer's problem and help him/her by providing a workaround or useful information about his use case. If s/he must continually ask redundant questions to acquire basic information, s/he will lose efficiency on every ticket.

Let's go back to the use case introduced in the introduction and see how a support agent can use Elements Connect to improve the accuracy and time to resolution. Let's imagine our Support agent just received a new ticket from the support portal: 

Data sources synchronization provided by Elements Connect

When the support agent opens this new issue, s/he will get all the information from the ticket like the type of accident, the impact, criticality but this example shows 3 more fields in our tickets generated by Elements Connect: 

• Salesforce Client Account
• Salesforce Client details
• Salesforce Opportunities

All the Connect fields will be displayed in the agent view and customer information like an e-mail or account ID will be used to fetch the data inside Salesforce by Elements Connect.

Support agent view of the tickets in Jira Service Management

For this example, we only displayed limited information about the account, but once you connect Elements Connect to Salesforce you could easily fetch anything you need from Salesforce inside Jira. This info from Salesforce will provide the support agent with key information like language preferences, address, time zone, phone number, and more, all to resolve the issue more quickly.

Increased automation, reduced manual process and save time in resolving support tickets 

To summarize, Elements Connect for Jira Server & Data Center is a powerful Salesforce connector that allows you to leverage Salesforce data in Jira to maximize the efficiency of actions taken by your support team. Once you have it implemented, you'll discover it can also help other teams like sales, consulting, engineering etc. Here are some benefits of using Elements Connect for Jira Server & Data Center and integrate Salesforce inside Jira: 

• Clarity around the context of the customer.
• Faster time to resolution. 
• No changes in your tool for your customer and for your team.
• Reduction of manual processes.

If you have reached this point, you may be interested in other use-cases or resources. I invite you to go further by consulting these links:

Close support tickets faster with Elements Connect, Salesforce and Jira

Visit Elements Connect on the marketplace

Discover the Elements Demo Portal

If you need anything else, I'm available for any remaining questions or I can make a demo of the app if you have further questions.