Angel.com is a hosted IVR and call center solutions provider based in McLean, Virginia, USA with just over 50 employees. They've been using JIRA and CustomWare's Salesforce.com plugin as part of their help desk solution. We called Aaron Wellman, product manager at Angel.com, the other day to ask him about how they're using the Salesforce.com plugin to JIRA:

How does Angel.com use JIRA?
We have two primary uses. Our Engineer's use JIRA for bug tracking and new feature requests. And the Client Services team uses JIRA to push customer service issues to the Engineering team. They both use the Salesforce.com plugin. However, it's really most useful for the Client Services team.

And how does Salesforce.com fit in?
Salesforce.com has a "crude" ticketing system that works well for Customer Service. Our Client Services use Salesforce.com as their customer service portal ticketing system.

Salesforce.com is expensive. Not everyone can have an account. But with JIRA, everyone has a profile. Because you can't customize the Salesforce.com workflow or process, an incoming ticket [that needs to be escalated or looked at] will get pushed into JIRA.

The plugin pushes the data from Salesforce.com to JIRA, and we'll receive an email notification from JIRA. All the data for the Salesforce ticket gets included, like the name of the case, the short description, long description, and comments.

How have you set up workflow?
An issue comes in from a customer. The Client Services team determines if an engineer needs to look at it. It really depends on the type of issue. If it's a telecom issue, it goes to one of the telecom guys. If it's a bug or enhancement request, it typically goes to me, and then I'll do a second-level vetting of the issue, and if it's something we really need to bring an architect in on then I'll assign the JIRA ticket to them and make sure it gets addressed. This also gives the product management team a way to gage the frequency that a particular issue is occurring without having to sift through unrelated customer support tickets.

Another nice thing about this plugin is that it's bi-directional. So, instead of a Client Services person having to go into JIRA they can see all the progress that's been made on that ticket inside of Salesforce. There's an iFrame inside of Salesforce that pulls in the issue navigator table from JIRA, so they can see all the issues that are in the system as well as the status of the issues.

Our sales people don't have to go into JIRA. Because the Client Services group "lives" in Salesforce, it's a better application for them to follow the status of an issue. JIRA isn't something they have to mess with.

Other uses?
There's also the other side of it. I can log bugs and enhancements in JIRA and then link the issue to a ticket in Salesforce. I can connect actual customer accounts in Salesforce.com to the feature enhancement or bug in JIRA that I'm working on. This allows me another other people in the organization to see if a client is waiting for a bug to get fixed or an enhancements to get developed. It provides a direct link to the customer account profile in Salesforce.com which is an easy way to see the type of implementation the customer has, information about the deal like who we were competing against to win the deal, the size of the commitment and other opportunities in the pipeline.

What was the installation of the plugin like?
The installation process was easy to get up and running with. I was able to integrate it on my own. I didn't need to do any coding. It didn't require me to understand too much of the Salesforce-side of things.

Thanks, Aaron!