Cathy works as a Customer Support Lead for a rapidly growing organization with customers around the globe. Her customer support team relies primarily on their CRM system to log, resolve, and track customer cases – which run into hundreds on an average day. This team is also the first stop for customers who need to report bugs and product usability issues. The product engineering team at her organization, meanwhile, lives exclusively within Jira to manage development tasks such as bug tracking, feature creation/enhancement, agile planning, and activity monitoring. This is where our story begins.
It is not easy for Cathy’s team to relay the information stored in their CRM (the system of record for customer data) to the engineering teams responsible for fixing those issues. Also, once customer support manages to report an issue, they lack adequate visibility into its progress, which makes it extremely difficult for them to share timely status updates back to customers.
Meanwhile, the product engineering teams have to rely on anecdotal evidence to prioritize their development efforts and assign responsibilities. Context really matters when a customer makes an important request: Who is the customer? What organization is the customer part of? Are they a top paying customer? What other issues are they dealing with? How many customers are affected by a given bug?
As different teams operate in their isolated silos, it inevitably leads to collaboration challenges, complicated cross-team communication, duplication of efforts, and inability to move swiftly on product issues. The mean case resolution time starts shooting up, the efficiency of teams declines, and the number of dissatisfied customers increases.
The solution? A system that allows a seamless flow of information between these two ecosystems by integrating their CRM and Jira in order to get rid of the customer data silos and gain 360 degree visibility.
Benefits of connecting the CRM system with Jira
There are a number of strategic advantages associated with linking CRM data with project management tools like Jira:
- Enhanced case transparency
- Instant and seamless team collaboration
- Reduced time spent in gathering customer information, which allows teams to focus on other business activities and work more efficiently
- Better allocation of resources and tasks across the organization based on overall customer impact
- Well-informed business decisions based on a holistic view of customers
- Improved customer experience due to excellent customer support
Challenges associated with integrating CRM and Jira
Since both Jira and CRM are two different platforms, so is their data structure, which is why integration can be tricky. Here are some of the top challenges that you need to take into account:
- No workflows should be adversely impacted by the integration
- No data must be lost when attempting to integrate these two systems
- All integration workflows should be error-free
- Data exchange between the systems must be absolutely secure and done via recommended security checks
Bidirectional automatic sync using the right plugin
Despite these challenges, connecting these two ecosystems is not just feasible but surprisingly easy when done via the right connector plugin.
Such a plugin can sync in both directions. As a result, Cathy’s customer support team will be able to create, update, track, and report on issues in Jira – without having to leave their CRM system.
At the same time, their product engineering team can work within Jira exclusively and act on the ticket, ask questions, and get access to all relevant background information. They will be able to map feature requests and bugs captured in Jira over to the CRM system and see which customers and service reps are affected.
Besides easy mapping of data types to increase transparency, it will also save time and manual efforts in managing and exchanging information.
If you want more information on how to set up hassle-free integration between your CRM and Jira, download your copy of our latest eBook.