Organize your customers into companies, departments, or organizations for better modeling of your support customers.
The organizational modeling of “customers” for Web+Center has been carefully thought out to handle a variety of organizational modeling requirements.
Reasons for our current customer organizational modeling
Email notification and direct 1:1 customer-to-tech interactions with the Customer+Center and Customer+Mobile applications require that our “customer” database defines records at the individual, single-person level rather than at the company or department level. Today’s email-based communication method requires tickets and support issues to be tied a single person and their email. It is still valuable to group, organize, sort, bill and report tickets based on their organization or company, so we offer tools to define “companies” and associate and sync customers with company/organization information.
Steps to using the Companies feature of Web+Center
(1) Companies (or organizations, departments ,etc) can be defined by clicking on “New Customers”, and then clicking the “Manage Company Records” Link on the upper right:
(2) On the page titled “Managed Billing Addresses”, click on the “New Company” button in the upper right hand of the page.
(3) For example, let’s say your IT company supports several persons at the company “Facebook” Enter a company called “Facebook” with address and contact (phone, etc) information that applies to the whole company rather than the individual. Save that information.
Once this company record is submitted, it will list the company on the “Companies”page.
(4) Create or find a current customer in the Web+Center by clicking on the “Get Customer” button and then clicking on the “Find Company ?” button.
(5) Clicking on the “?” button will bring up a pop-up search window. Select the “Search Billing Records” option. Clicking on the company will cause the company to sync with the customer record and automatically fill in the customer record sync fields. This is helpful if the company moves or addresses change, as the company address information will be updated automatically.
Why this is important?
(6) There are situations when you may have a list of companies that you service, but you don’t have individual customers defined or any support tickets and you want to be able to define companies in your database. We recently created a new Company Import tool that allows you to import “companies” into the Web+Center from a tab- or comma-delimited file. This feature is now available on the “System Configuration Menu” page under the “Customer Importing Tools” section.
Conclusions:
The Web+Center ticketing and customer support application is designed to support a wide range of organizational modeling. All of these customer/company modeling features are to enable reporting and invoicing/billing functions built into the Business+Center component. References to “Billing” are features that allow multiple customer account tickets and time-spent to be compiled and billed to a single company rather than individual customers.
Your organizational modeling of your customers and clients is crucial to your successful support operations.