CSM Consumer versus User table in Higher Education

[Fadi Haddad]

We are working on CSM implementation for our university to be used by multiple departments to support our students, employees, and external users. We already have ITSM/HRSD/FSM, and adding CSM will make it easier for our users to go to the one-stop landing page to do their business with our departments. We are implementing CSM in-house. The CSM Implementation and Fundamentals courses we attended at K23 did not give any real-world examples for Higher Education customers.

We have some questions:

How are you using Consumers, Customers, Accounts, and Partners in CSM? I see plenty of examples of corporate settings supporting companies and their consumers. Can you share some examples of what data goes into Consumers, Customers, Accounts, and Partners? Are you using Consumers for all users, including internal and external users (i.e. parents and prospective students with personal self-registered accounts created via third-party IAM i.e., Okta)? Are you putting your department data in Customers? Are you using Accounts and Partners?

Regarding the Consumer / Consumer_User table and Sys_User table - are there any specific reasons why we should not use the Sys_User table to store Consumer data? In other words, will redirecting the Consumer-related fields to the Sys_User table rather than the Consumer table introduce any problems down the line?

Any info would be greatly appreciated!

[Bert_c1]

Hi,

While I can't answer usage that you ask, I can tell you that the 'csm_comsumer_user' table extends the 'sys_user' table in my PDI. So your last question is you will be using both.  And in my PDI, there are no additional columns defined on the csm_consumer_table. However, there seems to be platform functionality that determines which records in sys_user show up in csm_consumer_user, as I have 895 records in the former and only 12 records in the latter table. I login as admin. Hopefully, Community member familiar with the CSM feature will provide their thoughts on your questions.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/utah-customer-service-management/page/product/customer-service-ma...

[Kristin J]

Hi Fadi,

I don't have answers for you but am in a similar stage of planning for a K-12 district, and I have similar questions to yours. I'll share what I learn/come up with.

[snowdev8]

Hi, curious. Were you able to find an answer to this?

[PeterdeBock VU]

hi Fadi, I just coincidentally arrived in this topic. We had the same question at the University in Amsterdam. We are now using the consumer field in every CSM case type and made a change in the dictionary of the Consumer table. Instead of referencing to Consumer User, we are referencing to User. Reason is indeed that internal employees can be students. And students are using quite a lot of services in the university (IT, Facility) and sometimes are temporarely an employee for a couple of months. The Consumer User is meant for external (external role) and does not fit this situation. The change we made did not have any implication (we are now on Xanadu).

We have got Case types for Library, Research, Education, Finance and Marketing/Communication.

regards, Peter