Working with Organizations

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Introduction

Manage your customers, your activities with them, associated contact's, notes and documentation.

Customer Manager provides a rich feature set to compliment the basic Organisation functionality. the basic features available with or without Customer Manager installed are:

Archive - If an Organisation is no longer needed, mark them as Archived. This will remove them from general Organisation searches, but will still be accessible from the Organisations list and Archived Organisations's option.
Contacts - View any existing organisation's contact's and add new ones
Logo - Upload an organisations logo

Features

With Customer Manager installed the following functionality is available against each of your customers organisation records

Activity Stream

The activity stream (timeline) provides the ability to collaborate on all matters relating to the organisation. Any user who has access to the organisation record will be able to view, post, comment, and follow organisations. Following an organisation will push any updates to their timeline to your News Feed, so you can keep informed in real time about updates to all organisations you are interested in.

As well as manually posting, and commenting, any administrative actions such as adding a member, creating an activity, linking an attachment will be recorded on the organisations timeline.

View the Activity Stream link in the related information section for more information on working with Activity Streams.

Organisations Details

Record the important information about each organisation.

By default the fields are organised into logical sections.
Administrators can move fields from one section to another, add custom fields and manage the attributes of existing fields.
Edit organisations details by selecting the Notepad icon in a details section
All changes will be recorded in the organisations timeline, including who performed the action, when and what the value changed from and to.

Contacts

Create and add contact's to the organisation using the Person icon in the tool bar.

Complete the mandatory first and last names, and optionally add job role and contact details.
Select More and add additional detail including language preferences (this is important if they will use the customer portal and for viewing content in their native language).

Existing contact's of an organisation can be viewed from the Contact's collapsable section.

Primary Contact - Use the Flag icon to mark one contact as a primary contact
Archive - Mark a contact as archived using the Trash can icon
Details - Click on the contact name to open their contact details record.

Service Contracts (Beta)

Create and Manage Service Contracts which the organisation has.

Add a new Contract by selecting the Contract icon from the action bar
Add a Contract name, description and type

Contract types can be configured in the admin tool > Customer Manager > Simple Lists > Contracttypes

Documents

Link Document Manager documents with the organisation.

From the Document icon on the tool bar search for the document you want to link

Search by Document Name
Filter search by ticking the Documents i own and or Documents shared with me filters
Further filter the document search by limiting search to a specific document library which you have access to.

All linked documents will be visible in the Documents collapsible section on the organisation record

Open a document by selecting the document name
Unlink the document from the organisation record by selecting the Trash Can icon next to the document you wish to remove

Requests

With Service Manager installed, View requests which have been logged against the organisation from the Requests collapsible section.
Portal Access - Manage the organisations contact access rights when visiting the customer portal

Contact's who already have portal access will be listed in the Requests section under Portal Access
Use the slider to decide against each contact to allow them to Cancel Service Requests they have raised
Use the slider to decide against each contact to allow them to View Requests which have been raised not only be them, but other contacts from the organisation on the customer portal

Attachments

Add attachments to an organisation record via the Paper Clip icon.

Select the files you wish to upload from your file explorer or by dragging and dropping them
Provide a description for the file you want to attach
Select Attach to add the attachment to the organisation record

All existing attachments can be viewed in the Attachments collapsible section in the organisations details

Open an attachment by clicking on it's name
Remove an attachment from the organisations record by selecting the Trash Can icon next to the attachment you wish to remove

Activities

Create and manage activities with the organisation. This can be useful for setting and getting reminders about next actions, or reviews.

Select the + icon from the Activities section to add a new activity, assign it, set a due date and reminder options
View all Assigned, Completed and Cancelled Activities for the organisation from the Activities section

Read more about Activities from the Activities link in the Related Articles Section

Members

Add internal users as members to an organisation, this could include adding their Account Manager, Support Manager or any other defined role.

Add a new Member using the + icon from the Members section
Remove a Member from the organisation by selecting the Trash Can next to the member you wish to remove from the organisation

Administration

Users with the Form Designer role, will be able to add custom fields, hide existing fields, edit their properties, and edit which sections of the organisation record, fields are displayed in. This can achieved by dragging and dropping the fields into the required sections. With the Form Designer role, users will see a Design option to go into edit mode.
Custom Buttons - Create custom buttons on the organisations details. Typical use of organisations custom buttons could be to link to a document (held in Document Manager, or other externally accessible cloud solution)

To create custom button, define the required URL, add in the variable (if required), in the above example possibly a document id held in one of organisations custom fields, give it a title, tooltip, icon and colour