How to: Integrate Jetpack CRM with Awesome Support

In this integration How To. I take a look at why you’d want to run a help desk from within your WordPress dashboard.

Here at Jetpack CRM, our philosophy is that hosting your own data is becoming a much more popular option than using a ‘SaaS type’ cloud offering. This way, if you ever decide you don’t want to keep using the software, the data is actually all yours and not over on someone else’s server.

The same goes for your support help desk. I could rattle off some names you’ve probably heard of (HelpScout, GrooveHQ) and I bet you’ve considered using them in the past.

I’d like to introduce another option. Just like with Jetpack CRM, you can host your own support system from your WordPress dashboard.

Introducing Awesome Support….

Why Awesome Support + Jetpack CRM

Of course, if you’re running a support help desk, you should really be using a CRM. I’ve said that a lot in these series of blog posts.

Here’s some of the benefits from that article:-

• You can see which of your Jetpack CRM contacts have submitted tickets (and whether they’re a lead or a customer)
• You can see which of your customers ask you a lot of questions (hinting at the need to improve documentation)
• You can use all the benefits of a CRM with your contacts who have submitted a ticket

The benefits of the CRM are, amongst other things:

• Being able to see all your contacts in one place (support users = leads, support users who have purchased from you)
• Tag your contacts with useful tags

How do you do it?

It’s super easy to integrate your Jetpack CRM with Awesome Support. We have an extension which does just that. Once you activate the extension you can see which of your Jetpack CRM contacts have sent in support tickets. This ticket summary is added to the Edit Customer page

This gives you a great way of seeing the tickets in that your Jetpack CRM contacts have opened with you and links in the CRM with your Awesome Support Desk.

Extra Customer Activity Logged

The extension also logs any tickets that have been opened against the customer in the activity log.  The ticket (top of the new above) looks like this inside Awesome Support.

… but it now gets added to the customer activity log for that user (and builds up the customer activity record).

Here’s how the same Activity Log looks with more added to it.

Also, once it’s into the log you can use the CRM advanced search to search across all of the CRM data and discover popular topics of support that have come in across your customers.

But what are the benefits again?

The benefits of integrating Jetpack CRM and Awesome Support is you get to use all of the power of a CRM with your support ticket users.

New contacts are created when a support ticket is sent in (if the contact doesn’t already exist in Jetpack CRM). If it does exist an activity note is added to the record.

But I don’t use a Support Ticket System

If you’re using email to handle support then I highly recommend switching to a support desk type system using the Awesome Support Plugin combined with Jetpack CRM. This will save your support tickets getting lost in your emails and it’ll also make sure you’re not losing touch with your contacts.