Customer Relations Management

At Balean, we use GitLab to manage organisations and contacts in GitLab’s CRM. This CRM is basic and simple but also part of the toolset we are already using. Matching our policy to use existing tools as much as possible, GitLab is the tool of choice for now, until we need something more sophisticated.

CRM Setup

The setup is very simple. Organisations and contacts are managed at group level in GitLab’s CRM so there is one group for Balean and one group for SBSC to be used as the CRM. For both these groups, the CRM featured is enabled in the group settings.

Opportunities are then created as issues in a project underneath those CRM groups: sales for SBSC and partners for Balean.

Organisation details are added in an epic per organisation.

Add new organisation

Organisations are not just added as a customer relation in GitLab, but also as an Epic in order to be able to store contract information and status information for the customer. The organisation as a customer relation only holds very limited information.

To add a new organisation, go to the group in GitLab that contains the CRM. Then navigate to Plan --> Customer relations in the sidebar.

Once in the customer relations, click on Organizations in the top right, just above the search bar. Now you can click on the New organization button. Fill in the fields for the organization and add it.

Once the organisation is added, also create an Epic in the same group as where Customer relations are enabled. Navigate to Plan --> Epics and click on New Epic. Use the organization name, prefixed with Organization: as the name of the Epic.

In the epic you can add links to:

1. Links to contracts, NDA’s and other documents
2. Important agreements with a customer
3. Customer status (as labels)
4. Status of negotiations
5. Other information important to store for a customer

Add contacts to an organization

To add contacts, make sure to navigate to the Customer relations section (See above under Add new organisation).

When you are in the Contacts section, you can click the button New contact just above the search bar, otherwise, click on Contacts first. Then fill in the details for the contact and add it.

Add contact to an issue

At the moment, you can not add contacts to issues via the UI. You can only do this via QuickActions.

To add a contact, go to an issue underneath the group that has customer relations enabled. On the issue add a new comment with the following text:

/add_contacts [contact:address@example.com]

Be careful to remove any spaces at the start of the line!

Post the comment and the contact will be added to the issue.

Please not the following limitations:

1. You cannot add contacts to epics, only to issues.
2. You cannot add organisations to epics or issues, just contacts.
3. All customers are also added to our bookkeeping software so no need to store addresses and such in GitLab unless it is information that is important or convenient to (also) store in GitLab.