Customer Data

[Craig Stretton]

I work for a software company and we are considering Jira as a replacement for our old (rather poor) support system and as a way to bring the various teams together (Development, Testing, Projects and ServiceDesk/Support).
The software seems flexible enough to use for our needs generally but the biggest stumbling block currently is a Customer Details Database of some sort. We have several customer sites and each has several members of staff within it that we may interact with and log tickets for.
At this point we wouldn't need customers to log into Jira themselves, but would need to be able to email them updates and receive emails in to convert to issues - however we wouldn't really want to treat each one as "Users" as this means going from 40 licences to a minimum of 500 instantly and would make Jira less attractive as a proposition.
I've investigated the marketplace and the only plugin I have found is "Tools of the Trade: Contacts Directory" which unfortunately doesn't seem to work on the version I'm trialling currently.

The system wouldn't have to be a full ITSM/CRM solution with a CMDB etc. but we would need a way to log calls against customers/sites and without excessive costs around licenses.

Any advice would be gratefully appreciated.

[MJ]

Hi Craig,
If you want to send out notifications to email addresses that are not connected to a user on the instance, you might want to look at the JIRA Enterprise Mail Handler on our marketplace. Concerning issue creation and commenting through mail, this is possible to configure in JIRA. Detailed information on how to set this up and the possibilities of this functionality can be found in the product documentation here.

You can sign up for a trail license of JIRA (and any other products we offer) and try them out to see if they are fitting your needs. During the trail period you will also have access to our technical support resources in case you have questions or need assistance. See the complete FAQ here.

Cheers!

[Craig Stretton]

Thanks for your reply I will certainly look into the add-on you mention.
However you didn't touch on any storage of Customer information, this would be necessary even if it was just basic name, contact number and email.. is there anything available?

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Craig, do you have a CRM system with customer details in already? Interactions by email are fine for getting queries/issues/etc loggedf but not good for extracting further information, using an email address its possible to do remote system lookups, but what/where? Is the management of customer details something you would like to see within the JIRA solution space?

[Craig Stretton]

From what I've seen of Jira so far it's a very good solution, and very flexible - it works well and it's potential to expand within a Software Company like ours is great, however from a Support perspective the fall down is customer details - it doesn't need to be a massive store of information down to each individual's shoe size, just contact information -- perhaps two multi-picker lists that are linked, one for the site code and another which then filters based on the first where one of potentially many individuals that work at that site can be chosen from.

If we had to have a separate database of names/sites and Jira could link in, that would work. It would be useful to filter on that information still and report on it where possible.

We do have another system where we store information for CRM purposes and linking Jira with it would be good also, although the people stored in there aren't always the end users, and the end users aren't always in the CRM software. Although, this is an "in-house" piece of CRM software.

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Interesting, from a JIRA context, who would be making these changes, would any JIRA user in say the 'Developer' role of a project be able to create/update such information? Would there need to be isolation between user-sets and projects? there may be privacy concerns for any kind of web based lookup (even within your userbase), I've added JEMH-1214 to look at this.