For Customer Success teams, how do you set-up your project space? Any best practices.

[Kyren Cabellon]

We're currently exploring Jira Work Management for our Customer Success (1 person for now) team and I'm looking for ways on how to set it up initially with best practices suggestions and then build from there what works for us.

We want to track which customers we're doing our implementation, where they are right now, some metrics as well (engagement, and others we don't know yet).

[Margaux]

Hi @Kyren Cabellon, 

I'm Manager Customer Experience at 55 Degrees and I handle customer success in our organisation. I use our Jira project to track my work in my workflow such as training (and all the different subtasks). However, it would want to be able to track what you are doing for each customer and what has been done vs. still pending, you should probably look into using a CRM or even better a Customer Success Platform. I tried using only Jira but it was hard to have all information related to 1 customer gathered in the same place. 

2.5 years ago we started with a CRM (Pipedrive) and it was a great help is setting up pipelines and automations for different phases of a customer journey, I had different pipelines for evaluations (each products and versions), I could design and trigger automatic emails to be sent a specific moments... to remove as much manual work as possible. I could also plan my next activities, for example sending Q3 meeting invitation (with templates)... 

We now outgrew the CRM and needed more metrics about the % of evaluators per products overtime, New Sales vs Upgrades vs Churn vs Renewals, usage data... and for that we needed a Customer Success tool. There are many of them out there that gather all your customer and their subscriptions details, you can design whole playbooks and get all the metrics a CS person dreams of. We went for Planhat because it shows all the metrics in configurable dashboards that you can also share with your customers. 

Today, I use Jira to track all the work I need to generate for our Planhat implementation (ie. Story: Create dashboards related to product A and Subtasks: Create Churn dashboard, evaluation vs sales dashboard...) 

If you need CS metrics, it's better to use a tool that has been designed for this purpose, it really made my life so much easier! 

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at margaux@55degrees.se

[2Ship Support]

Hi Margaux, 

Thanks a ton for sharing the above information, I am starting a new CS team and I came here to learn about how to use Confluence/JIRA to drive customer success. Your reply provided me with a great point to start from and I may reach out for some other questions when they arise. Thank you so much. Sham 

[Daphné Ghesquière]

Hello, piggybacking on this topic as I also am a CSM looking for ways to use Jira  for customer success. We are a team of several CSMs, each serving several customers. While we know using a CSM platform would be ideal, we are trying to see if we can configure Jira, a tool we already have, to serve customer success workflows. If anyone has suggestions, I am keen to learn! Thanks.

[Marcio C_]

HI @Kyren Cabellon , I asked our internal AI tool and got the following answer, which seems like a great start. I would pair it with the general understanding Jira/Jira Work Management. Hope it helps!

• Introducing Jira Work Management 
• Friendly by nature, powerful by default It’s Jira, built for business teams 

Setting up Jira Work Management for your Customer Success team is a great idea! To start with the best practices and build a system that works for your team, follow these steps:

1. Create a new project in Jira Work Management:
- Choose the "Business" project type.
- Select a suitable template (e.g., "Task tracking" or "Customer support").
- Name your project and set the project key.

2. Customize the issue types:
- Define the issue types that suit your workflow, such as "Implementation," "Onboarding," "Support Request," "Feature Request," etc.
- For each issue type, create relevant custom fields to capture important information, such as "Customer Name," "Implementation Stage," "Engagement Level," etc.

3. Configure the workflow:
- Create a custom workflow that reflects your customer success process. For example, your workflow could have the following stages: "New," "In Progress," "On Hold," "Completed," and "Closed."
- Set up transitions and statuses to reflect the flow of work through each stage.
- Add any necessary automation rules, such as auto-assigning issues to specific team members or updating custom fields based on specific triggers.

4. Set up boards and filters:
- Create a Kanban board to visualize your team's work in progress.
- Set up filters to help your team focus on specific customers, issue types, or implementation stages.
- Configure swimlanes to group issues by customer, priority, or other relevant criteria.

5. Define metrics and reports:
- Decide on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you want to track, such as "Time to First Response," "Time to Resolution," "Customer Satisfaction," etc.
- Configure Jira Work Management reports to track these KPIs, using the built-in reports or customizing your own.
- Schedule regular review meetings to analyze these metrics and discuss any improvements or adjustments needed in your processes.

6. Train your team and onboard customers:
- Ensure your team is familiar with the Jira Work Management platform and the specific processes you've set up.
- Create clear documentation for your customers to follow during the onboarding and implementation process, including how to submit requests or report issues.

7. Iterate and improve:
- Regularly review your processes, issue types, workflows, and metrics to ensure they're still relevant and effective.
- Gather feedback from your team and customers, and make improvements as needed.

By following these steps and best practices, you'll create a solid foundation for your Customer Success team in Jira Work Management. From there, you can continue to refine and adapt your processes as your team grows and your customers' needs evolve.

[Stian Kristoffersen]

Hi @Marcio C_ 
Thanks for the guide.
I have multiple clients, and my CS team has multiple persons like me with multiple clients.
Should we have one project per client, or should we have one project like "The active clients project"?