how-to Assigning more than one customer to a request

[IntegraGreg]

When creating a new request, Service Manager does an auto-complete and turns it into a closable element (see the image), which suggests you should be able to add more than one, in the same way to adding more than one recipient to an e-mail action on a request. Unfortunately when you try this it simply replaces the existing value.

Is this not an intended feature? If not is it possible to allow either one Organisation's contact visibility over all requests per Organisation, or another way of granting them visibility on a request-by-request basis?

Thanks,

Greg

[Hornbill Staff DR]

Hi Greg,

thanks for your question.

The behaviour that you experience with the customer search form is by design. It is only possible to associate a single customer to a request. It sounds like your aim is to provide visibility of all an organisations requests to one specific contact (that of course is part of that organisation) via your Customer Portal.

I am aware of some development Change requests which should provide the functionality that I believe you are seeking. I will raise this with our product owners and see if they can provide further detail on the subject.

Thanks,

Dan

[Steven Boardman]

Hi Greg

Thanks for your post. Dan is correct the expected behaviour is to have a single customer per request. We are currently developing a new feature which will allow an analyst the ability to add 'connections' to a request. This is similar to the current ability to be able to add other analysts to a request as 'members'. However 'connections' look at this from the perspective of either other interested parties or impacted users - This change is CH135266 and is currently in development.

The second part of this is giving a contact at a supported organisation visibility via the customer portal (or co-workers / basic users at in internal organisation via the service portal) the rights to view other requests raised by their colleagues (within their organisation) not just their own. This Change is in our incoming queue for development, reference number CH00129897 and will be started shortly.

I hope this helps

Thanks

Steven

Service Manager Product Management

[Martyn Houghton]

Greg

We too have a similar requirement to link multiple interested parties (users/external contacts) to an request and provide the 'visibility' of these via the customer/service portal.

One thing we would find useful would be for these 'connections' to be able to be include automatically in the email addresses when sending an up date form the request as well.

Cheers

Martyn

[IntegraGreg]

Thanks all for the replies. This is definitely something that's quite important for us since we're using Service Manager to primarily support external customers.

[Steven Boardman]

Thanks Martyn, Greg

The Connections feature will enable an analyst to add contact's and or co-worker's to a request and define their relationship (interest) in the request. Once they are added, if a manual email is being sent, the analyst will see an 'Add Connections' option on the email view, and if selected the connections email addresses will be added (these can be edited, removed before sending). In addition a new BPM operation will be provided which will allow for the automatic sending of emails to connections of a request at any stage in a business process supporting a request.

Following discussions with Martyn we will also be adding another BPM operation which will allow for Connections to automatically be added to requests through the business process designer - in the same way that 'Members' can currently be added as a BPM operation. This feature will follow the introduction of the Connections functionality.

I hope this helps clarify what will be available shortly.

Thanks

Steven

[IntegraGreg]

Hi Steven - thanks

With regard to change CH00129897, is it possible to get an ETA? I'm being asked regularly by our customers on when this feature may be available.

[Steven Boardman]

Hi Greg

Change CH00129897 is now in development, it has been split out to first make this functionality available on the Customer Portal, so your external customers contact's will have an option to view requests raised by other colleagues in their organisations (rights permitting), we will then do the same for the Service Portal. We would expect this feature to be available in 2-3 weeks time for the Customer Portal, and therefore your external customers and their contacts.

Thanks

Steve

[IntegraGreg]

Hi Steve

That's great; thanks for the update!