Companies and contacts

Companies

Companies in the Support rail lists the organisations you support, with their domain, how many contacts they have and how many tickets.

A company can have several domains. That matters because domains are how inbound mail finds its way to the right customer: an email from someone@northwind.example is recognised as Northwind Traders without anyone having to add that person first.

“Company” is one table across the whole app. The same Northwind Traders you support is the one you bill and the one you sell to — Add existing on this page is for pulling a company you already have in Sales into the Service Desk’s view, rather than making a second copy of it.

Companies can be marked internal — that’s for PTO, training and R&D, the things you book time against that aren’t customers.

Contacts

Contacts lists the people. Each has a name, an email, the company they belong to, and their access — whether they can sign in to the customer portal.

One person, one row

A contact and a CRM contact are the same human. The list marks people who exist in both, and editing the person in one place is editing them in both. That’s deliberate: the alternative is Dana Okafor existing twice with two different phone numbers and nobody knowing which is current.

The Sales module’s Contacts page shows the same people through a different lens, with a filter across the top: CRM only, Both, Support only, All people. Support-only contacts are the ones who raise tickets but aren’t part of any deal; CRM-only are the ones you’re selling to who’ve never contacted support. Neither list is the “real” one — they’re two views of the same people.

Portal access

A contact with no access can still raise tickets by email; they just can’t sign in and look at them. Granting access sends them an invitation to the customer portal — see What your customers see.

Satisfaction surveys

Contacts can be individually excluded from satisfaction surveys, and the list has a filter to show you exactly who is. Use it for the automated mailboxes and the people who’ve asked not to be surveyed — otherwise your satisfaction numbers slowly fill up with noise.