Customer groups

Introduction to customer groups in ConSol CM

Every contact in ConSol CM belongs to a customer group, which determines the data model and the available actions and relations. Users are granted permissions to view and edit contacts based on the customer group.

Concepts, terms and definitions

Concept	Other terms	Definition
contact	customer, unit	Stakeholder who gave the reason for opening the case; can be either a company or a person.
person	contact	Type of contact on the lower hierarchical level
company		Type of contact on the upper hierarchical level
customer group		Group of customers with a specific contact model; basis for assigning permissions and determining the available activities and relations
contact model	customer data model	Data model for contacts; contains one or two contact objects which provide further settings

Purpose and usage

The ConSol CM system can contain one or several customer groups in which contacts can be created as run-time data. The customer group defines the data model of the contacts and the available actions and relations. In addition, it determines if a contact can be added as main or additional contact to the cases of a certain queue, see Customers.

Access to contacts is granted by customer group, so that the users can work with all the contacts which belong to the customer groups for which they have permissions, see Permissions for contacts. Contact permissions are also required for working with cases where the contact is mandatory.

Basic settings for customer groups

The following settings are available for customer groups in the Basic tab.

• Internal name: The technical name of the customer group.

• Localized name: The localized name of the customer group. Used in the Web Client.

• Contact model: The contact model used for the customer group. Can only be changed if the customer group does not have any contacts.

• Localized description: The localized description of the customer group. Used for system documentation only.

• CM/Track user assignment: Defines how CM/Track user profiles should be assigned to contacts of the customer group. Possible value are:

  • None / internal: Default. The Portal user profile field is not shown in the Web Client. The CM/Track user profile cannot be assigned neither in the Web Client nor via REST API. This setting is useful if CM/Track is not used or if you want to assign the CM/Track user profile via script, see Assigning a CM/Track user profile via script.

  • Manual: The Portal user profile field is shown in the Web Client. The assignment of a CM/Track user profile is done manually by a user in the Web Client, see Granting access to CM/Track, or automatically using the REST API.

  • Fixed: The Portal user profile field is not shown in the Web Client. All the contacts of the customer group have the same user profile, which is automatically assigned to all new contacts created in this customer group. Existing contacts in the customer group are not modified. Therefore, you need to assign the user profile by script to these contacts.

    As soon as the customer group has contacts, the assignment mode Fixed cannot be changed anymore.

• CM/Track user profile: Only shown if Fixed is selected in CM/Track user assignment. Determines the user profile which is automatically assigned to all new contacts.

Actions for customer groups

In the Actions tab, you can determine which actions are used for the contact objects (person and / or company) defined in the contact model. There are three kinds of actions:

• Automatic actions: The action is executed automatically when the event occurs. This can be the creation, update or deletion of the contact or a modification to a contact relation. You can select one action of the respective type for each situation.

• Manual actions: These actions can be performed manually in the Web Client. They are displayed in the Activities box in the upper right corner of the contact page. You can assign as many actions of the type “Manual” as needed and sort them using the Move up and Move down buttons to determine their order in the Web Client.

• Search actions: These actions can be performed manually in the Web Client. They are displayed in the Activities box in the upper right corner of the detail search page when the tab of the respective contact object is selected. The action is executed for all selected results in the tab. You can assign as many actions of the type “Search” as needed and sort them using the Move up and Move down buttons to determine their order in the Web Client.

CM/Phone settings for customer groups

In the CM/Phone tab, you can set the prefixes and patterns which are used to complete phone numbers. This feature allows the users to enter any kind of phone number in contact fields. If the entered phone number is not complete, CM/Phone will extend it with the provided information, so it can be used for calling.

The following fields are available:

• Country prefix: Defines the international country prefix for extending national phone numbers. Must be provided without prefixes like 0 or +. The country prefix is required in order to check whether an outgoing call is within the same country. Some phone providers do not handle canonical numbers for domestic calls, and the country prefix has to be removed from the number in such cases.

  Example “49” for Germany.

• Area prefix: Defines the local city / area prefix for extending local phone numbers. Must be provided without prefixes like 0 or 1.

  Example: “89” for Munich in Germany.

• Company prefix: Defines the phone number of the company without extensions. Adding an extension number to this prefix would allow a local call from outside the company to this extension.

  Example: “45841” for ConSol Germany.

• Subscriber pattern: Defines the regular expression which is used to identify whether the number entered in the contact field is a full subscriber number (potentially including an extension) which would allow for a local call.

  Example: \d{7} for seven digits numbers.

• Internal pattern: Defines the regular expression which is used to classify extensions if only a phone extension is entered.

  Example: \d{3,5} for extensions consisting of 3 to 5 digits.

• Mobile pattern: Defines the regular expression which is used to identify a number entered as a mobile phone number in the country, which would be valid to make a national call to a mobile phone.

  Example: \d{6,} for numbers with at least 6 digits.

See CM/Phone for details about CM/Phone.

Basic tasks

Managing customer groups

Customer groups are managed on the Customer groups page of the Web Admin Suite. The following actions are available:

• Create a new customer group
  Click the New customer group button above the list of customer groups or duplicate an existing customer group by clicking the Duplicate icon of a group. Provide the required settings in the Basic (Basic settings for customer groups), Actions (Actions for customer groups) and CM/Phone (CM/Phone settings for customer groups) tabs.

• Edit a customer group
  Click the Edit icon or customer group’s row and update the desired data in the Basic (Basic settings for customer groups), Actions (Actions for customer groups) and CM/Phone (CM/Phone settings for customer groups) tabs.

• Deactivate a customer group
  You can deactivate customer groups by clicking the Deactivate icon.

  If you deactivate a customer group, you cannot create new contacts for this group and the group is not shown in the All customer groups selector in the Web Client. Existing contacts in the customer group can still be viewed and edited and it is possible to create cases for them.

• Activate a customer group
  You can activate customer groups which are deactivated by clicking the Activate icon.

• Delete a customer group
  You can delete customer groups which do not contain contacts and are not assigned to any queue by clicking the Delete icon.

Advanced tasks

Assigning a CM/Track user profile via script

You can use the following piece of code to assign a CM/Track user profile (“mytrackuser” in the example) to a contact (“unit” in the example). This is useful if the Portal user profile field should not be displayed in the Web Client (CM/Track user assignment set to None / internal) or if you set the CM/Track user assignment to Fixed and need to set the selected user profile also for the existing contacts.