Every customer creating a ticket in your helpdesk will be added as a contact in your helpdesk automatically. You can group these contacts into companies and you can give the contacts option to view tickets created by other contacts in the same company.
You can also associate a single contact with multiple companies. This will be useful when:
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A reseller wants to raise tickets on behalf of various businesses that buy your product from them
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A freelancer/contractor wants to create tickets on behalf of your clients
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An account manager wants to raise issues that your customers are facing
When you associate a contact with multiple companies, you can capture company information for every ticket, regularly track the kind of issues/tickets raised by one of the companies associated with this one requester, and have a good flow of context on the history of these issues.
Quick guide to associating a contact with multiple companies
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Login to your Freshdesk account as an Admin.
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Go to the Contacts tab on the left panel.
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To change the company association of existing contacts, click on More > Edit next to the contact name.
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In the company section, click on Add company . You can start typing the name of the company and pick the company from the dropdown that appears.
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Click Save. A new contact-company association is created.
Note: You can associate up to 300 companies with a single contact.
Viewing tickets belonging to a company
You can choose to let a contact view all the tickets belonging to a particular company by clicking on the ticket icon next to the company name. When there are multiple companies, you can choose visibility of tickets for each company.
Default company
When you add multiple companies to a contact, the first company will be taken as the default company. If a ticket is created without specifying the company name (for example, ticket created through email), it is associated to the default company of the ticket requester.
We recommend that you always have the default company as the company to which the contractor/reseller/freelancer originally belongs to.
How does associating a contact with multiple companies affect your support flow?
Once you add multiple companies to a contact, companies are seen as a part of a ticket rather than as a part of a contact. So a company field will be automatically added to your ticket fields.
1. Admin > Workflows > Ticket fields
The company field under Ticket fields will let you choose if the field has to be filled out compulsorily. If you choose 'Required when closing a ticket', agents will not be able to close tickets without picking a company from the list of companies associated with the requester.
2. Ticket details page
If a ticket is created by a requester who has more than one company associated, the company field will appear in the ticket details page.
3. New ticket page (Agent view)
When agents are creating a new ticket, they will be able to see the company field if the requester they choose is associated with multiple companies.
4. New ticket page (Customer view)
A customer who creates a ticket through the helpdesk form will be able to see the company associated with their contact in the helpdesk if:
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the customer has logged into your helpdesk, and
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the contact of the company has been associated with multiple companies.
5. Billing
You can track the billable hours for all the tickets that were raised by one requester who is associated with different companies/organizations. From the left panel, go to Reports > Productivity >Time Sheet Summary you can choose Group by Customers and bill each company appropriately. You can also filter your Time Sheet Summary for one customer and bill as per the hours tracked by the reports.
6. Contact-company association deletion
You can delete a contact-company association from the contact edit page by clicking on the '-' icon on the left of the company name. When you remove a contact-company association, the existing tickets you created for this particular company will continue to carry the same company name.
You cannot delete the company itself from the contacts page, you can only delete the contact-company association. For example, let's say:
contact A is associated with company 1 and company 2 ;
contact B is associated with company 1
After you delete company 1 from contact A's edit page:
contact A is associated with company 2;
contact B is associated with company 1.
Disabling the one contact-multiple companies feature for your helpdesk
By default, you will be able to associate a contact with multiple companies. However, if you would like to ensure that every contact is mapped exclusively to a single company, you can disable the feature with the following steps:
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Click on the Admin tab on the left panel of your portal.
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Under Support Operations, click on Customer Fields.
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In the Contacts tab, scroll down to the Company field and click on Change.
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Toggle the Associate one contact with multiple companies button OFF to disable the feature. Now, contacts can be associated with only one company.
Please note that your customers will not be able to add multiple companies to their profiles. It can only be done by agents who have 'Contact Edit' permissions (under Admin > Roles > Permissions).
