Why Should You Consider Migrating from Salesforce to Jira Service Desk?

Salesforce is one of the most powerful and popular CRM/Sales platforms in the world, and for very good reason: it’s an incredible solution for sales organizations, and it’s incredibly customizable. And, they’ve built a well-rounded ecosystem offering marketing, commerce, and service desk solutions to their best-in-class sales capabilities.

However, many organizations that rely heavily on Salesforce for their customer relationship management are also equally reliant on popular Atlassian solutions for other aspects of their business, including project management and DevOps.

If your organization is currently using Salesforce for internal and external customer service issue management, but you’re also using Jira or other Atlassian solutions, there’s good reason to consider switching to Jira Service Desk.

First, let’s consider why you may want to switch. Then, we’ll discuss the nuts and bolts of migrating your customer service operations smoothly from Salesforce to Jira Service Desk.

Why Migrate to Jira Service Desk?

Since you’re already using Salesforce, we don’t need to convince you of how awesome it is:

• Incredible scalability
• Best-in-class CRM feature set
• One of the best APIs in the world

They haven’t become the gold standard for CRM SaaS solutions for nothing. But, let’s take a closer look at their offering on its own.

In most ways, they’re equal…

When compared head-to-head with Jira Service Desk, Capterra users reported that both solutions were nearly identical in overall quality and customer satisfaction. Jira Service Desk pulled ahead by a hair in terms of ease of use, value for the money, and customer support, but both solutions ranked very well in all areas.

Jira Service Desk offers a nearly identical feature set, so making the switch won’t mean sacrificing functionality. And, while Salesforce offers a few options out-of-the-box that Jira Service Desk does not, the huge library of available add-ons and integrations fills those gaps handily.

… but, not in price.

But, here’s the big difference: Salesforce costs more than twice as much per user: $25 per user per month as opposed to Jira’s $10.

Rapidly growing organizations with popular products out in the wild will probably need to grow their customer service team even faster than their sales team, at least early on. So, it probably makes a lot of sense to separate the sales and service functions in order to save $15 per user per month for every new customer service representative you need to bring on in the future.

The Atlassian ecosystem

Of the two, there’s no doubt that Jira Service Desk is the solution more geared toward users in IT and related fields. That’s just a matter of pedigree: Jira is the leading project management solution among development organizations, built by Atlassian, a leader in that industry. Salesforce was built for sales teams.

Whether purchased as a plugin or standalone solution, Jira Service Desk is automatically and seamlessly integrated into the larger Atlassian ecosystem of solutions. That obviously includes Jira itself, but also Confluence, BitBucket, Trello, and several others. From a DevOps perspective, every ticket created in the service desk system will be available to both developers and help desk representatives without needing to rely on third-party integrations. So, the entire development workflow becomes smoother and more efficient.

If what you do revolves heavily around IT and development, you may already be invested in one or more of Atlassian’s products. In that case, Jira Service Desk is the obvious choice since its integration with those other solutions will translate to faster onboarding, a more robust knowledge base to rely on, more efficient working and tracking of tickets, and much more.

Making the Move from Salesforce to Jira Service Desk

Let’s pretend you’ve already decided to migrate from Salesforce to Jira Service Desk. What challenges should you expect? And, what’s the best way to ensure a smooth migration?

Complex data migration challenges

As is the case with any large-scale migration between different systems, moving from Salesforce to Jira Service Desk can be complicated. Salesforce offers a powerful export/extraction tool called DataLoader.io that is simple enough to use and should be able to export all ticket data to a CSV file. And, as noted before, the Salesforce API is excellent, so customizing that data extraction would not be a difficult process either. However, there are currently no direct or third-party integrations that can facilitate a completely automated data swap between the two solutions.

Once you have your Salesforce data extracted, the main issues you will run into include:

• Proper mapping of the data upon import
• Loss of ticket hierarchy
• Separation of internal and external comments within tickets
• Complete migration of attachments

The trouble with data mapping

That first challenge on that list creates all the rest in a domino effect. Data mapping is one of the toughest issues facing companies attempting a migration on their own. Unless you’re intimately familiar with the intricacies of data mapping in both Salesforce and Jira Service Desk, data loss is almost inevitable.

That’s because the data lives in different fields in each solution, with different formats and naming conventions. In some cases, Jira will have no corresponding field for data you want to import, so a new custom field will need to be created and configured. All of this must be handled manually, and any manual activity introduces the likelihood of human error, no matter how careful you are.

This manual process also takes a lot of time. You can’t just stop working while migrating between systems, so you’re already investing resources that could be working more profitably. All this translates into a potentially costly and frustrating process. But, it doesn’t need to be that way.

Many organizations have chosen to work with professionals when taking on a migration. Often, it comes down to a simple cost/benefit analysis, which you should also consider: if the cost of hiring professionals turns out to be less than you would have spent in delays and error-correction handling it on your own, then it’s a no-brainer. Additionally, working with experts can make an otherwise stressful and frustrating experience much easier.

Conclusion

In this blog post we reviewed several compelling reasons to consider a migration from Salesforce to Jira Service Desk and explored some of the potential benefits and challenges. For more information contact the experts at Cprime today to discuss our full-service data migration solutions, including migrating from Salesforce to Jira Service Desk.