Hello Community,
We are currently designing a ServiceNow CSM data model for a payment processing company and would appreciate feedback from those who have implemented similar scenarios in production.
Business Context
- We provide support services for merchants that use POS terminals, mobile payment solutions, QR payments, and related services.
- Our contractual relationship is with financial institutions (banks).
- Each financial institution has many affiliated merchants.
- Merchants contact our support center regarding incidents, requests, onboarding activities, device issues, and service inquiries.
- Merchants are businesses/organizations, not individual consumers.
Current Design Discussion
We are evaluating how merchants should be modeled in ServiceNow CSM.
Option 1
- Financial Institution = Account
- Merchant = Consumer
- Merchant representatives or workers are not registered as ServiceNow users
Option 2
- Financial Institution = Parent Account
- Merchant = Child Account
- Merchant representatives or workers are not registered as ServiceNow users
One of our concerns with Option 1 is related to how merchants would participate in the broader CSM model. We understand that, according to ServiceNow documentation, a Contact is a person who works for an Account. Therefore, merchants themselves should not be modeled as Contacts since they are organizations rather than individuals.
Questions:
- In similar B2B2B or B2B2C implementations, how did you model merchants (customers of your customers)?
- Did you use Consumers, Child Accounts, or another entity?
- Did you encounter limitations around:
- Assets / Installed Products
- Contacts
- Entitlements
- Contracts
- Customer Portal
- Account Relationships
- Workspace experiences
- Looking back, would you make the same design decision again?
Our primary objective is to stay as close as possible to the OOTB CSM model while ensuring long-term scalability and minimizing future customization.
During our analysis, we observed that when a Merchant is configured as a Consumer, ServiceNow OOTB already surfaces Consumer-related information across several customer service experiences. For example:
- Interaction records include both Account and Consumer fields.
- Customer Information tabs display data associated with the Consumer.
- Customer History timelines can be viewed in the context of the Consumer.
- Recent Interactions and Open Cases can be filtered and displayed by Consumer.
- OOTB customer service experiences appear to recognize the Consumer as a first-class entity for case and interaction management.
Based on this, we have additionals questions for the community:
If Merchants are modeled as another entity (for example, Child Accounts or a custom approach), would equivalent functionality remain available OOTB? Are Consumers merely an alternative data model, or are they actually a key entity leveraged by multiple OOTB CSM experiences?
We are trying to understand whether Consumers are merely an alternative data model, or whether they are actually a key entity leveraged by multiple OOTB CSM experiences and customer context capabilities.
Thank you in advance for your insights.
