Accounts & Companies - Contacts & Users

[Richard T]

Morning

Ever since we began moving to customer service Management we have struggled to get clarity around the definitive structure we need to implement to allow the ITSM and CSM modules to fully service both our internal staff and external contacts.

Our main difficulty has been around understanding the core configuration for our own company and users and the external accounts and contacts.

What we know so far is :

• Our own organisation should be configured as a "Company"
• Our Organisations staff should be set up as "Users"
• Our external B2B customer should be set up as Accounts
• Our external customer staff should be set up as Contacts

Our issue is that we have some internal departments and users who act as a form of Partners for Accounts, can these be Users and Partners or do they have to be a Contact to be a Partner? For the record, these particular internal staff and departments do not have any SN licences.

If they have to be a contact it would make it problematic when it comes to then logging internal IT Incidents , Requests and Changes etc as they would be the wrong user type for our Service Desk to log a ticket against.

Have I completely misunderstood the basics here?

Ultimately we would like our employee Fred Smith to be able to log a ticket for an Account as well as log his own internal Incidents.

Many thanks

Richard

[Kavita Waldia · Accepted solution]

Hi Richard,

What you have stated is correct - In CSM anyone external to your organization, customers and partners, are setup as Accounts and external users belonging to those accounts are set up as contacts for those Accounts. 

Anyone internal to the organization is setup as a user (technically contacts is an extension of User table, so every contact will also be in the user table, just like every account will be in Company table) . If they are creating cases or working on cases, they need to have an SN license. 

Like you said, if internal users are setup as partners/partner contacts, then there could potentially be unable to use other ServiceNow applications such as HR Incident Management etc. A CSM external user does have rights to some applications such as Request, Change so those will function for contacts. E.g. an external user can submit requests via the portal.

The correct way for your use case - employee Fred Smith to be able to log a ticket for an Account as well as log his own internal Incidents - would be to either assign these internal employees the

1. customer service agent role which gives them full access to create case on behalf of any account as well as access the IT service portal
2. proxy_contact role which gives internal users the ability to log cases on behalf of any account, without getting the full access that an agent has. Documentation- https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-customer-service-management/page/product/customer-service...

NOTE that both the roles require a full SN licenses, but proxy_contact let's you limit the capability available to non-agents. This setup would ensure that internal users in customer facing roles other than support can continue to access all the NOW applications meant for employees, while also being able to log and follow up on cases on behalf of external customers.

Regards,

Kavita

[Richard T]

Thanks for the reply KAvita, that has helped clear things up in my mind.

Regards

Richard

[ankita7]

Hi Kavita, 

Based on the above response, I have one query related to my CSM setup.

Company A has contacta 1 and 2

Company B has contacts 3 and 4

contacts 1 2 3 4 needs access to view and edit all CSM cases for both companies.

With what level of access we can achieve this. please guide

[Alex D Great]

What about Vendors in the above definition? Is it correct that vendors belong to the company class? If so are they users or contacts?

Also if we apply contact class to internal staff, then proxy_contact, whats the difference?