Turning Atlassian JIRA into a CRM

Here at Member.buzz, we use Atlassian JIRA to track our features, bugs, and incoming requests from users through our Support Site. So when it came to choosing a CRM, we wanted to find one that integrated nicely with the rest of our infrastructure.

Our first thought was to try out some of the existing JIRA CRM plugins. Here are the ones we tried out:

Although there were definitely some interesting features among these options, there was nothing substantial enough to make us want to choose a specific one. We wanted something simple, yet well-integrated into what we already had setup.

So we decided to build it using Native JIRA.

Our first step was to create all of the Issue types:

Issue	Description
Customer	A group or organization that is using our product or may eventually do so. Clients will normally be associated with several Contacts and Interactions.
Contact	An individual, usually associated with a Client or Investor, who can be contacted. Contacts will normally be associated with several Interactions and one or more Clients or Investors.
Investor	An investor is an entity that has already or may eventually invest in us. Investors will normally be associated with several Contacts and Interactions.
Bucket	Groups Customers (Networks and Sites), Investors and Stakeholders into logical groups. These groups can be used to differentiate between Pipelines.
Interaction	The CRM equivalent of a Feature. This can be either a Meeting, Call or Email and will normally be associated with a group of Contacts.

Associating CRM Issues

At its core, a CRM is focused on tracking the interactions that your team has with other people.

As you can see, an Interaction can be associated with any Contact, Client or Investor.

To show how it works, we can take an example. Take the following Client (a real Member.buzz customer). This page contains all of the basic information:

If we scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see several linked issues:

The association between the Client and Contacts is automatically created by including the Contact's ID in the Description (thanks to the JIRA AutoLink Plugin). The Interactions listed here represent a meeting that took place with the Client. To separate the different types of issues, checkout the Issue Matrix plugin.

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