Chris Meijer
Product Marketing
How to work efficiently with customer data using a Customer Relationship Management system.
Access customer data quickly and on any platform using a CRM system. Increase efficiency by combining your CRM system with Jira or Confluence.
Enrich your Jira issues and Jira Service Management tickets with customer information.
By integrating your CRM system with your Atlassian tools, you can combine all customer information into valuable insights. Gather Jira issues and Jira Service Management requests and get an overall view of your customers' wants and needs.
Complement your CRM system even more with API functionality.
Push or retrieve customer information and use your CRM system in combination with third-party software. For example, enrich your CRM system with details from your marketing automation campaigns or website results and get a complete overview of your customers.
Boost your sales and enrich your Atlassian tools with customer data.
Companies are increasingly aware of the fact that customer insight is key to their success. The demand for systems that improve customer experience and services is rising globally. Creating a business strategy to serve your customers' needs enables you to offer better customer support and increase sales.
Organizations want to make sure customer data is accessible and usable for everyone in the organization. When a customer reaches out to your organisation, you and your colleague need access to all the details of the challenge your customer is facing. This enables you to communicate more accurately and help your customers with tailored content or offers.
In this whitepaper, we share how to work more effectively by combining customer data with your Atlassian tools. Furthermore, we offer ways of gaining customer insight by linking customer details with Jira Issues and Jira Service Management tickets. Finally, we show you how you can turn opportunities into sales by tracking different sales stages.
This whitepaper aims to help you understand how to get more customer insight and enhance your sales process. Combining your Atlassian tools with customer data will make you more successful.
Managing and measuring all phases of the customer lifecycle is getting increasingly more complicated. The different touchpoints and project management channels can make it a hassle to stay up to date on the progress of tasks and tickets of new and existing customers. In order to serve both prospects and existing customers, you want to have insight into their challenges and understand how you can provide them with the information, services, or tooling that enable them to tackle these challenges.
In many organisations, Avisi included, customer information is literally everywhere. You find important details in your emails, Confluence pages, Jira Service Management Issues, and Excel sheets. So how do you benefit the most from all this data, and how do you bring all the data together to get a better overview of the customer needs?
Some claim that there are more differences between a CRM system and project management software than there are similarities. This is true in a way - project management tools like Jira and Confluence are mainly internally focused, while CRM systems focus on external activities like sales, marketing, and customer support. However, by integrating CRM system records with project management tooling, you can gain a better understanding of your customers and create a competitive advantage.
Create a competitive advantage
By using Atlassian tools in your organisation, you store a lot of relevant customer information in your Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management instances. You know the progress of a Jira project related to customers, have customer tickets in your Jira Service Management environment and you can probably find relevant documentation like use cases in your Confluence pages. Combining all this valuable information can bring you a competitive advantage. For example, you can extract relevant information to send your customer a customized proposal, or gather customer feedback to improve your products. In other words, you can act easily on customer's wants and needs by closing the bridge between your Atlassian tooling and CRM system.
“There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Work more efficiently with customer information
Implementing a CRM system will help you to work more efficiently as there is no need to switch between tools to find all relevant information. It is your information hub for all relevant customer data.
We will give you an example of a challenge and the potential benefits of integrating client information with Atlassian tooling:
“Support desk hero Ellen is solving a Service Management request for an employee of a customer. During her coffee break, she is chatting with her colleague John about how to help this customer. In doing so, she accidentally discovers that John is solving an issue for another employee from the same company. Unfortunately, the issues are set in different projects, so there is no way of easily capturing all issues in one overview. A lot of navigation is needed to filter all the issues linked to this customer. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to easily retrieve this company information in one click?”
This is why many organizations want a CRM system that integrates with support and project management tooling. By connecting the two systems, the software provides you with a clear view of a customer's situation. Industry estimates suggest that around 91% of organizations with more than 10 employees in their workforce use CRM systems. Organizational departments such as sales and marketing and customer services & support are increasingly integrating CRM systems into their business operations to improve customer experience which subsequently increases business profitability.
But there are more strategic benefits of linking CRMs data with project management tools:
How do you stay up to date on client projects? And how do you get the most benefit from customer information that is stored everywhere? The answer sounds simple: by implementing a CRM system. Excellent. Until you find out that there are hundreds of different CRM systems and you have no clue which one to choose. Let us help you to define steps to determine which CRM system suits you best.
A CRM system will help your organization build new customer relationships and improve the experience of existing customers. It is one place to look into your customer details and view all interactions with a contact. Your CRM system holds information such as the customer’s order requests, sales history, and contact information. The system manages all the work you are doing to close a sale.
Selection of a Customer Relationship Management System
A fully integrated use of a CRM system has many advantages. It can reduce churn, drive engagement, increase revenue, help you learn more about your customers, and even make them more successful. Sounds great, right? Not so fast. CRM systems are no magic software that will benefit your organization without setting up and implementing a clear strategy.
What are the 5 steps to selecting the perfect CRM for your business?
There are many CRM systems on the market. Making a choice is not so easy in the first place. Before considering your options, you should answer the following questions:
Don't start with a big bang. Pick the core features you really need for starting up. Identify a few groups within your company that will use the system the most. Get them involved and make them feel part of the design and decision-making process. If you are able to convince them, they will become ambassadors who will help other users in their team adopt the system early and easily.
Think about which workflow would make the most sense for your teams. Talk with your teams to learn how they imagine using the CRM system. Don't overcomplicate the working processes in a way that might cost your teams extra time and energy. Try to find a way to make using the CRM system as convenient as possible. This brings us to the next step.
Train your employees to use the CRM system correctly and to the full extent which is suitable for your needs. If you are unsure of your expertise, get a team member trained. If you need some external input, consult experts. Make sure that everyone fully understands what their responsibilities are, what is expected of them and how it benefits their daily work.
Take time to learn how the CRM system is adapted. You might have to make some changes or reflect on the previous highlighted points. Also, don't forget to measure the turnover of the use of the CRM system. Look back at the benefits the CRM system adoption has had for your organization and identify what you can still improve to benefit even more.
Try to find CRM systems that integrate seamlessly with your existing project management and collaboration tools. Your Atlassian tools contain important information that can add additional value, such as your work process, invoices, planning, and budget. As the level of your success with a (potential) customer will heavily depend upon how well you know your customers' wants and needs, you will want to integrate both systems. After all, a happy customer is essential to every business.
By integrating your CRM system with your Atlassian tools, you can assemble all customer information into useful insight. You can easily get an overview of your customers' wants and needs. For example, you can quickly look up the open and closed service requests, or view the progress of a Jira ticket.
If you are already using a CRM system to store customer information, an API can help you enrich your CRM system with information from Jira and Confluence. This means you don't have to copy and paste the information to your CRM system and you and your coworkers always have a complete overview of your customers. You will find more information about the API in part 6 of this whitepaper.
So how can the connection between your Atlassian tools and CRM system assist you in increasing your sales? We have drawn up a list of the most beneficial features.
As an Atlassian Solution Partner, our experts often get the question if we can connect Jira Issues, Jira Service Management requests, and Confluence pages with customer information. Adding customer data to Jira and Confluence would help users to respond quicker and more accurately to customers, and it would take less effort to gather all customer information and gain customer insight.
At first, there were only a couple of options to connect customer data with Atlassian tooling. By setting up a tailor-made API, we could push customer information to a third-party CRM system. The challenge is that every organization has its own unique API requirements and there are countless available CRM systems in the market. Another option was to set up Jira as a CRM system. Unfortunately, Jira is not designed to manage user data, and user properties are not searchable and cannot be shared across multiple users.
This led to the creation of our second solution: Atlas CRM.
Atlas CRM is a CRM system that integrates seamlessly with Jira and Confluence and it enables users to link customer information with Jira and Confluence. Furthermore, it is equipped with an easy to configure API that helps organizations to push customer information to any external system.
In this part of the whitepaper, we dive deeper into the sales management options of CRM systems, how you can get customer insight from Jira issues and Jira Service Management requests, and we will have a look at the possibilities of the Atlas CRM API.
Accurately measuring sales performance is important to drive growth. It helps you to measure team and overall sales performance. In most CRM systems, you can set up your own sales funnel and visualize your organization's sales process and conversion.
Using sales funnel stages can help you to get insight into your sales performance. Here is an example of how sales management works in a CRM system like Atlas CRM.
Step 1: Finding a new lead
The first step in closing the deal is to gain new leads. A CRM system can help you enrich the lead with information such as the customer and company involved in this sale and the estimated revenue the sale will bring. The information present in a sale is shown in the picture below.
Step 2: Turning it into an opportunity
The second step to take before winning a deal is turning the lead into an opportunity. It is possible to add the estimated probability that the sale will be won in percentages in your CRM system. While moving the sale to another sales funnel stage, you might want to increase the probability!
Step 3: Signing the contract
The third and last step to win your deal is creating and signing the contract. In your CRM system, you can change the status of a sale. Either change status: Won (Hopefully) or change status: Lost (maybe this customer wasn’t actually worth it ;).
Customize your own sales funnel
Every company is unique and uses different funnel stages. Does your sales process involve more or different stages? Adjust the CRM system to your needs and align the sales funnel with your sales process by adding additional stages.
You are having trouble answering a Jira Service Management request, but you know you have answered the same question for another customer in the past. Or you are in a meeting with a customer and you quickly want to look up the progress of a project. By linking Jira Issues and Jira Service Management requests with your company and contact information, you can get actionable insights and help your customers immediately.
In Atlas CRM, Jira Service Desk requests and Jira issues can be linked to companies and contacts. By doing so, you can start collecting meaningful data about your customers.
This creates an overview of all issues and requests that are attached to an organization, which immediately results in meaningful insight. You can see what needs to be done without navigating through different Jira projects and you can enrich the company and contact profiles with additional information, such as contact details, customer interactions, and the sales progress. In other words, an integration between Atlas CRM system and Jira issues and Jira Service Management requests helps you to get a clear overview of your customers' wants and needs in just a couple of clicks!
Customer insight is important for every user in your organization. You can analyze and better understand the challenges your customers are facing. This leads to better decisions and more accurate communication with the customer. Getting insight into the Jira Issues and Jira Service Management requests of your customer can help your organization to be more profitable!
The goal of customer relationship management is to get a complete view of your customers' wants and needs so you can act on them. Integrating relevant customer data is a key part of it. It allows you to get a better insight and offer new customers a more tailored customer journey. It also enables you to adjust the marketing and sales contact points to your customers' needs, and improve customer retention by personalizing your customer service and marketing efforts.
We created an API within Atlas CRM that helps you to retrieve or push customer information. Let's have a look at the possibilities.
Integrate Atlassian tools with Atlas CRM
Atlas CRM Jira users have access to the Atlas CRM API. The API is designed to help you build integrations to get the most value out of Atlas CRM or other third-party software. The API offers you multiple endpoints. For example, you can push or retrieve information to use Atlas CRM in combination with marketing automation, email programs, or another CRM system. This way, you can use customer data from a wider perspective and get a more detailed perspective of your customer.
Feature examples of the Atlas CRM API
The Atlas CRM API is available for Cloud, Server and Data Center instances.
We are here to help you integrate your Atlassian tools with customer data. Either you want to use Atlas CRM as your CRM system to work more efficiently and gain insight, or utilize it as a platform to enrich your current CRM system. Atlas CRM is available on Cloud, Server, and Data Center in the Atlassian Marketplace.
Let us know if you have any questions. We are happy to help you!