By Mudit Garg, Head of Product, Sinergify. Sinergify were finalists in the ‘Most Agile / Responsive SaaS Solution of the Year’, ‘Best SaaS Product for IT Management’, and ‘Best Enterprise-level SaaS Product (non-USA)’ categories at the 2023 SaaS Awards.

Driven by a combination of business imperatives and a sense of urgency brought about by the pandemic and conflicts around the world, organizations have been dedicating time and financial resources to enhancing operations.

Over the past decade, SaaS platforms have experienced explosive growth. Companies are moving operations to the cloud, recognizing the benefits of SaaS. This includes cost savings, accessibility, automatic updates, and the ability to scale up or down as required.

Most businesses use multiple SaaS tools to enable teams to communicate and collaborate. In order to build cross-team coordination and increase productivity, you’ll need to integrate the tools your organization uses.

“In the realm of B2B SaaS, integrations go beyond simply combining features; they entail combining opportunities. Employing integrations strategically will enable you to power customer acquisition and loyalty.” Mudit Garg, Head of Product, Sinergify

Let’s first understand what happens when teams use multiple tools.

When Teams Use Multiple SaaS Tools

According to research carried out by Salesforce, the volume of applications in use across organizations surpasses 1,000 on average, with less than 30% of these being integrated. When you use SaaS platforms like Salesforce and Jira in isolation, you risk building communication silos. This can lead to disjointed workflows, where different parts of a project or process are managed in separate environments. It can slow down productivity and create bottlenecks.

Here’s a little context about Salesforce and Jira.

Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform that gives support, sales, and marketing teams real-time access to customer data.

Jira, on the other hand, enables you to track bugs, issues, requests, and work-in-progress items and helps teams organize work, track progress, and stay agile.

Now, here’s what happens when you use Salesforce and Jira separately.

Teams that use these platforms independently of each other keep switching between them to access and share data. This increases the likelihood of errors, reduces transparency, increases case resolution time, and complicates workflows.

So, how do you resolve these challenges?

A SaaS-based solution will enable you to combine the power of platforms such as Salesforce and Jira. Before we look at how you can integrate these platforms, let’s look at the benefits of integration.

The Benefits of Integrating Salesforce and Jira

Here’s how you benefit by integrating these platforms:

• Strong Team Collaboration: Create a single view of customer and project data for all teams.
• Cost Savings: Automate tasks & workflows between Salesforce and Jira to reduce operational costs.
• Improved Customer Service: Provide customers with seamless & personalized experiences.
• Increased Team Productivity: Reduce manual data entry and errors.
• Enhanced Product Development: Track & manage customer feedback and feature requests.
• Better Reporting and Analytics: Create custom reports for better insights into sales, marketing, support, and engineering operations.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction: Provide better experiences and increase customer satisfaction & loyalty.

Now that you know more about the benefits of integrating Salesforce and Jira, let’s learn how you can integrate them in order to make the most of their capabilities.

How to Integrate Salesforce and Jira

There are two key methods by which you can integrate Salesforce and Jira:

Custom Integration: In this process, you’ll need to write code to integrate the platforms. This process needs to be carried out in a manner that enables one or two-way data flow between instances.

However, custom integration may only solve the problem in the short term. Once you’ve implemented the integration your ability to add functionality will be limited. Essentially, this method enables data flow between Salesforce and Jira, but not much else.

Connector: A SaaS-based connector will enable you to set up a bi-directional flow of data, as well as workflows to manage tasks. This will be a scalable, long-term solution, offering more use cases and functionalities as user demands change over time.

A connector is easy to set up and is customizable on the basis of business requirements. Finally, here’s how you can select a Salesforce-Jira integration connector.

Selecting a Salesforce-Jira Integration Connector

Once you’ve decided to go with a SaaS-based Salesforce-Jira connector, here are a few points you’ll need to keep in mind:

Decentralized Integration: Your teams should be able to work independently and exchange data between platforms.

Flexibility: You’ll need a connector that enables data exchange with minimal configuration, even for complex use cases. The connector you select must be able to handle evolving requirements.

Reliability: The connector must be capable of ensuring synchronization without the need for manual intervention. When one system goes down, the connector should be able to restart activities as soon as it’s back online.

Security: The connector you select must be Salesforce-native and use the REST API for data transfer. Furthermore, it should be data privacy-compliant, code-free, and listed on Salesforce AppExchange.

In addition to the above key points, the connector should address the following use cases for Salesforce-Jira integration:

• Creating Jira Issues from Salesforce: Create a new Jira issue from the case details page.
• Search and Link Jira Issues from Salesforce: Search for and link Jira issues that are similar to cases in Salesforce.
• Make Jira Feeds Visible to Customers: Make Jira feeds visible to customers via communities.
• Sync Attachments & Comments: Sync attachments and comments from Salesforce to Jira, and vice-versa via auto, manual, or selective sync.
• Control Feed Items: Use a hashtag in the feed to link a case in Salesforce to a Jira issue & send feed content as a comment or attachment.
• Notify the Case Owner of Jira Updates: Notify the case owner in Salesforce of updates to Jira issues.
• Centralize Updates on Salesforce & Jira: Sync updates from Salesforce to Jira to prevent discrepancies in data.
• Update Case Status of Resolved Jira Issues: Update case status on Salesforce once the linked Jira issue is marked as resolved.
• Change Jira Status from Salesforce: Change the status of Jira issues and handle Jira transition screens from Salesforce.
• Automatically Create Jira Issues: Automatically create a Jira issue with Apex Triggers and Process Builder.

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at what happens when teams use multiple SaaS tools. In addition to this, we learned about the benefits of integrating SaaS platforms like Salesforce and Jira.

We also looked at how you can integrate Salesforce and Jira, as well as how you can select a Salesforce-Jira integration connector.

By now, you have a clear understanding of the importance of integrating workplace platforms like Salesforce and Jira. Integrating them will enable you to combine their capabilities, as well as drive customer success.