link customer company to company user

[ines]

Hi,

we are using OTRS:ITSM 3.0.6. In our company its is very import to have an overview of all tickets from a customer (COMPANY!).
I know that I can link the CUSTOMERID in the customer user. The problem I have is that I can write everything in the CUSTOMERID. Is there a possibilty that we just can select existing CUSTOMERIDs (from CUSTOMER COMPANIES) for ex. with a drop down menu or autofulfillment? Sometimes we have tickets without a customer user but a customer company.

How do you handle this? any suggestions?

Thanks

[crythias]

The customerID should be the company. http://forums.otrs.org/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=7531

[krmagic]

Hi,

this we understand . But there is no "list" to choose... so if we 50 customer companies. I have to know the ID for each company.

[crythias]

@krmagic who is "we"? A customer-side who manages multiple companies or an agent side? Are you manually adding a user and trying to find the company that the user belongs to?
If the customer is new and sending an email, you might be successful in using a PostMaster filter to apply a customer_id based on email domain. If you're manually adding a customer because an agent is handling a phone request, I can understand that issue. No currently easy solution built-in to OTRS for manual add new client lookup customerID.

[Giulio Soleni]

Hi,
I had managed that by enabling CustomerCompanySupport => 1 in the Config.pm file or at least uncommenting the same line in Defaults.pm
Once you have done it, the CustomerID that you insert when you define a new Company will become available on a menu in the CustomerID for each customer.

It's still a feature I'm testing... so I cannot say this is the right way you have to use... I let the last words to the experts

HTH
Giulio

[krmagic]

first of all - thanks for your quick answers!

@crythias. i wrote we because i know the user ines .

In fact i want to adminstrate a lot of cutomers (company) and assign users to the company. it is necessary to create statistics based on customer companies (eg. How many tickets were solved sucessfully for one company). THe main issue is that an agent cannot remember all CUSTOMERIDs when creating a phone-ticket (for example). Its is also important that agents just use existing CUSTOMERIDS (created on Customer Company) when creating new users.

@Giulio Soleni: will try that .

[crythias]

Linking to customer LDAPs or existing customer databases can help (and oops, I did forget about enabling Customer Company Support).

[krmagic]

i tried CustomerCompanySupport solution. It helps us!


Thanks you.

[mowog]

Hi, If I understand correctly then I'm in the same situation. I tried editing Config PM but I still don't get a dropdown or any additional validation on customerID

Code: Select all

    # ---------------------------------------------------- #
    # insert your own config settings "here"               #
    # config settings taken from Kernel/Config/Defaults.pm #
    # ---------------------------------------------------- #
    # $Self->{SessionUseCookie} = 0;
    # $Self->{CheckMXRecord} = 0;

	CustomerCompanySupport => 1;

    # ---------------------------------------------------- #

    # ---------------------------------------------------- #
    # data inserted by installer                           #
    # ---------------------------------------------------- #

customerID.jpg

OTRS 3.0.6

I'm pretty new to OTRS so hopefully I just botched editing the file. Solutions anyone?

...the situation here is that I'm trying to select a new service desk app and I would really, like it to be OTRS. It's a "must have" requirement that I should be able to easily view all the calls for a given company and that customers should be able to see all the tickets that their company has open (not just the ones they raised themselves). It's a major shortfall of the current solution that "Company" is a free-text field and that therefore we cannot quickly pull up the support history of an organsation.

Actually in an ideal world I think we would like this functionality to go even further. I would prefer if individual customers could be associated with more than one company and if we could control whether they just see their own tickets for that company or if they see tickets raised by others.

What would be really ideal is some way of achieving this example:

Consider that we have a company "A". We have a commercial relationship with Company A. User 1 works directly for company A and is the system owner. User 2 is an app specialist and doesn't work for Company A. User 2 works for Company B to whom company A have outsourced their ICT opperations. Company C also opperate a manged ICT setup and have also outsourced to Company B. Company B sensibly leverage the fact that they already have an app specialist and so user 2 may raise calls on behalf of company A or C or maybe even company B themselves (E.G. if they have their own test system independent of A or C).

User 1 is associated with Company A only. He may view all tickets that have been raised in association with company A. He may not view tickets that are associated with any other companies
User 2 is associated with Company A, Company B and Company C. He may view only his own tickets that he has raised in association with either company A or company C. He can view tickets that have been raised to Company B (not just his own)

I guess OTRS doesn't get anywhere near ultimate setup right now? It's pretty complex so I think it's understandable if it can't be achieved. Unfortunately it means I have to right "non-compliant" on that row when I'm evaluating OTRS.

Hope this all makes sense! I didn't make it through the whole OTRS manual yet so go easy on me if I've missed something obvious.

[crythias]

Reminder to read this again: http://forums.otrs.org/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=7531

Consider that we have a company "A". We have a commercial relationship with Company A. User 1 works directly for company A and is the system owner.

User1 has a CustomerID of Company A

User 2 is an app specialist and doesn't work for Company A. User 2 works for Company B to whom company A have outsourced their ICT opperations.

User2 has a CustomerID of Company B

Company C also opperate a manged ICT setup and have also outsourced to Company B. Company B sensibly leverage the fact that they already have an app specialist and so user 2 may raise calls on behalf of company A or C or maybe even company B themselves (E.G. if they have their own test system independent of A or C).

User 2 needs to handle his relationships with A or C himself, but he'll open tickets with you as a customer with a CustomerID of Company B.

User 1 is associated with Company A only. He may view all tickets that have been raised in association with company A. He may not view tickets that are associated with any other companies

At this point, I have to ask if User1 is an agent or customer. If agent, User1 can see everybody. If customer, only Company tickets related to User1's CustomerID (and his own).

User 2 is associated with Company A, Company B and Company C. He may view only his own tickets that he has raised in association with either company A or company C. He can view tickets that have been raised to Company B (not just his own)

Yes, because *his* tickets are in "My Tickets" and Company B's tickets are in "Company Tickets", as long as everyone in Company B has a CustomerID of Company B.

[mowog]

Thanks for the quick and thorough reply. I'm going to do some more reading and see if I can figure this out. Still not sure why I don't get validation on CustomerID but hopefully It's just a training issue for me.

User 2 needs to handle his relationships with A or C himself, but he'll open tickets with you as a customer with a CustomerID of Company B.

...that's not great for us. If we can't report on who the end user organisation is for calls raised by User 1 then that's bad from an account management point of view. I don't think we can't work that way.

Our relationship isn't generally with the managed IT provider, it's with the end user organisation. We have a small number of generally high value accounts with very low churn and very high repeat business. We need to know how those end user organisations are doing and not have that obscured by the fact that they go through a third party for support.

If a sales guy is trying to sell more product and he hears that they are having problems with what they've already got then he needs to be able to search all the calls for the end user organisation (they can't be filed exclusively against some third party IT provider)

If an end user organisation is having a slew of issues then I want to be able to flag that in a report and make sure that they get an account management call. I also can't do this if som or all of their calls are filed against a third party.

Even in the rare cases where our support contract is actually with Company B then that's pretty irrelevant... The product need is with companies A anc C and they will be using our products long after B has been kicked out.

[crythias]

...that's not great for us. If we can't report on who the end user organisation is for calls raised by User 1 then that's bad from an account management point of view. I don't think we can't work that way.

Do you mean User2? User 2 isn't part of your Company A. What difference is it to Company A what User2 at Company B does and for whom?

[crythias]

Our relationship isn't generally with the managed IT provider, it's with the end user organisation. We have a small number of generally high value accounts with very low churn and very high repeat business. We need to know how those end user organisations are doing and not have that obscured by the fact that they go through a third party for support.

I didn't grasp this from your original question. But even still, based upon everything else you've presented, unless User2 at Company B self-presents that he's working on behalf of Company A or Company C, how will you obtain that information?

[mowog]

...that's not great for us. If we can't report on who the end user organisation is for calls raised by User 1 then that's bad from an account management point of view. I don't think we can't work that way.

Do you mean User2? User 2 isn't part of your Company A. What difference is it to Company A what User2 at Company B does and for whom?

Yes, I mean User 2, my bad.

I didn't grasp this from your original question. But even still, based upon everything else you've presented, unless User2 at Company B self-presents that he's working on behalf of Company A or Company C, how will you obtain that information?

Good question. At the moment they don't get support assistance until they tell us the license serial and the organisation it belongs to. Once we start accepting SMTP and web submissions then it gets more complex. Particularly for the SMTP I think.

For web submissions I can imagine two ways of doing it:

1) License serial number should be a mandatory field when submitting a web ticket and should validate against the license DB
2) The customer interface should not permit self registration. We generate accounts for a limited number of trained and approved contacts.

I think option 2 is really horrible when you start to examine it but I think this is what my line manager originally envisaged...

For SMTP I'm really not sure how this can be achieved. If a mail comes in from a new recipient then a ticket is generated. The ticket must be associated with a new customer. The customer must have a CustomerID. I guess we just have to manually change the customerID every time we see a new recipient but that seems leaky. I think I would need to report on customerIDs so that I catch any that don't match the naming convention.

[crythias]

http://forums.otrs.org/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=6586 for the SMTP (Refuse email from those who aren't in your database.)

[crythias]

Also: Ticket Free Text for Serial Number.
TicketFreeText[1-6] needs a key (label) and a value when referenced. Making it mandatory for the web interface is easy enough. Validating it... I'll think on it, but a Ticket Event http://forums.otrs.org/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=10090 (TicketFreeTextUpdate) or PostMaster Filter might be useful in that regard.