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Customer and Partner Relationship Management in Confluence by Multiple Vendors

Travel around the Atlassian galaxy long enough, and you’ll find that there are nearly as many uses for Confluence as there are stars. With hundreds of Solution Partners, thousands of Marketplace apps, and tens of thousands of organizations using Atlassian software, there’s no shortage of innovation or use cases.

We recently travelled to one of the strangest places in the galaxy to discover how one company uses Confluence for customer and partner relationship management (CRM & PRM). Below we describe the unique constellation of apps a US Atlassian Partner employs for CRM/PRM in Confluence. They use Confluence as their own knowledge base and team collaboration tool. And over the years they have developed several best practices and innovative use cases, including CRM/PRM.

As a fast-growing business, this company recognized the need for customer and partner relationship management. They needed an overview of their customers, prospects, and partners to help build strong and sustainable relationships with them. For most organizations, such visibility is essential for continued success and growth of a business.

They used four apps to extend their Confluence wiki:

  • Google Apps Connector by M20 Technology – to connect Confluence with the company’s Google Apps account to retrieve contact details.
  • Reporting and Scaffolding by ServiceRocket – for building a table with contacts of customers and partners on a Confluence page.
  • Table Filter and Charts for Confluence by StiltSoft – to dynamically filter the contacts table (e.g., search for a specific contact), find all contacts of a certain type (customer, prospect, or partner) or within a given location, and hide columns irrelevant for a current session.

This constellation of apps enables the company to create a table with contacts like the one below:

This example contacts table includes:

  • 6 columns that are automatically populated with data from a linked Google Apps account: Name, Company, Email, City, State, Phone.
  • The Type column, which has a predefined list of options a maintainer of a contact’s table needs to manually choose from (customer, prospect, partner.  
  • The Notes column, where you can enter any additional contact related information.

Columns can easily be added (e.g., contact status, job title, LinkedIn profile, lead source) or deleted from the contacts table as needed.

Filtering and finding contacts The Atlassian Partner uses the Table Filter and Charts for Confluence app to easily search, filter, and analyze contact reports. Some common filters are:

  • Global filter to search in all columns of a table.
  • ‘Company’ free text filter for search by Company name
  • ‘Type’ drop-down filter to filter by contact type, e.g., to see only prospects.
  • Hide columns filter to select what columns are not important for your current goals and should be hidden.

Filters can be added and changed on the fly in the filtration panel. The contact’s report is dynamically updated when the filters are applied. This company likes this solution because it also enables them to create pivot tables and illustrative charts to get a quick summary of the contacts table and analyze the contacts list.

It’s incredibly convenient to manage your contacts in the platform where your collaboration happens. This is just one of many interesting use cases for Confluence. Keep reading to see some of the other amazing ways businesses of all shapes and sizes are using Atlassian software.