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Using Remedyforce for External Customer Support

RightStar TeamJanuary 26, 2023

I was reminded recently of how helpful Remedyforce can be for external, B2B customer support. RightStar has been using it for that purpose, so we know how handy it can be, but we have had other customers interested in it with the same kind of use case.

One of the key things for B2B support is Contracts. You can use the Contracts object in the Remedyforce CMDB to say which product the client is entitled to support from. Note: I recommend linking it to the Account, not the Client, but of course, it depends on your use case.

Once you have the Contract(s) linked to the account, you can then use a Lookup field on the Incident to pull the customer’s contracts and select the one that pertains to that ticket.

Ok, that’s a lot of words – what does it look like?

Incident Ticket

Tip: Put Account first, and then you can select the account and see just the clients for that account!

Contract field:

And Voila! You are now tracking calls against contracts and can report on that.

Creating the Contract field and adding a lookup

To create the Contract field – in Setup/Object Manager/Incident, add the Contract field as a lookup field:

And to do the lookup, go to Remedyforce Administration/Application Settings/Console Lookup Filter and create a filter something like this (up to you if you want to make it optional or if you want to use the second criteria of Supported = Yes or if you want to add more criteria; I have it Apply in Self-Service so I can use it there).

Self-Service

You can also have that field on the Self-Service ticket form, so customers using the portal can select the contract as well.

And, of course, the logos/colors on the portal can be driven by the Account that the client is linked to.

Notifications

One other thing we do here at RightStar includes having the Support Type and the Account Manager on the ticket, so support knows who to contact if needed; also, the Account Manager gets an email for every ticket their customer puts in.

Form Simplification

With external support, we often also simplify the Incident form – maybe remove the SRD and Broadcast fields, for example. Fields like CMDB item can be moved up to the client section. The other great thing about Remedyforce is that if you are ALSO using it for internal support, Support can have its own Form Layout type. Maximum flexibility on one platform makes Remedyforce unique in the market!

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