Manage companies and contacts with the full support relationship in view

Companies represent the organizations you support; contacts represent the people you work with. Keeping those relationships accurate helps a B2B team see repeated issues, understand account context, and continue a conversation when another person or agent takes over. A company’s history provides context that a single contact’s inbox cannot.

Choose the right record  ·  Find and inspect a customer  ·  Create or correct the record  ·  Use customer context in an account review  ·  Handle duplicates carefully  ·  Correct an existing company or contact  ·  Prepare an account review across several contacts  ·  Common customer-data problems

Choose the right record

A relationship does not by itself grant someone access to every linked record. Customer visibility, agent permissions, divisions, and configured policies remain important.

Find and inspect a customer

1. Open Customers and choose Companies or Contacts.
2. Use search or the available Recently viewed, Assigned to me, and All companies or All contacts scopes. Use Filter, Columns, and Group to focus a longer list. “All” is still limited by your access.
3. Open the record and check its identifying details and active state. Confirm that similarly named companies or people are not being confused.
4. Review recent Cases and use View all Cases when you need a fuller history. The recent-case panel is not proof that no older issue exists.
5. Review available account-health and related information in context. A summary is a prompt for investigation, not a substitute for reading the relevant cases.

Create or correct the record

1. Search for the existing record before choosing New Company or New Contact. Duplicate records fragment support history.
2. Enter the organization or person’s identifying details and complete the fields required by your configured customer policy. Confirm the company association when creating a contact.
3. Check role, support, relationship, and other applicable settings with the responsible administrator if they affect customer behavior. Do not copy another customer’s settings simply because the records look similar.
4. Use the editor’s save action, then reopen the record and verify the details and relationship. Creation and editing require the relevant customer permissions.
5. When handling a request, use the available Create a Case for this Company or Create a Case for this Contact action from the correct customer record, or select the customer carefully during Case Add. Verify the resulting case association.

Use customer context in an account review

• Review open commitments before an account meeting, then check recently closed issues for repetition.
• Use a customer-focused view for the meeting agenda and open current cases before making a promise based on an older export.
• Use available favorites or watcher controls when ongoing attention is useful, and remove unnecessary monitoring when responsibility changes.
• Correct outdated contact information through the approved record workflow; avoid leaving the only correct details in an internal note.

Handle duplicates carefully

Merge is consequential because it consolidates the relationship and history into a surviving record. Company merge can move cases, contacts, and assets to the survivor. Compare both records before using it; a similar name is not enough to establish that they represent the same organization.

• Identify the intended surviving record and verify its authoritative details.
• Compare company/contact identity, related cases, assets, and configured customer settings.
• Use the permitted merge workflow only when the records genuinely represent the same entity.
• Afterward, inspect the surviving record and important linked history. Confirm that the people and assets are associated as intended.

Bulk actions such as assignment, roles, synchronization, merge, and delete depend on your permissions and the selected record type. Review the actual selected rows and intended scope before applying them.

Correct an existing company or contact

1. Find and open the existing record before creating anything new. Compare the organization name, contact email and relevant history when similar records appear.
2. For an organization, choose Edit Company, correct the intended fields, and choose Save Company. For a person, choose Edit Contact, verify Primary Company and the intended details, and choose Save Contact.
3. Complete any required customer-policy fields and read validation messages. If a field or action is unavailable, ask the responsible administrator about permissions rather than creating a duplicate to work around the restriction.
4. Reopen the record and check the saved values. Review related cases or customer access if the correction affects how support identifies the customer.

A primary company is the contact’s main company association; additional relationships can represent other organizations the person works with. For example, an external implementation consultant may work with two customers. Do not change the primary association merely to represent an additional relationship. Review the intended relationship and customer visibility with the administrator, using the contact configuration guide when that setup is required.

A shared email domain does not prove that two people belong to the same legal or support organization. Subsidiaries, consultants and service providers may use names that look related while having different service commitments and visibility. Verify the relationship from an authoritative customer source.

Prepare an account review across several contacts

Imagine the operations manager reports delayed orders while the technical administrator reports repeated connector retries. Start from the company record and compare the relevant cases across contacts. Read the original messages before deciding these are one issue: the shared company gives context, but it does not prove a common cause.

1. Confirm the company identity and the contacts involved. Record who is the business decision-maker and who supplies technical evidence in the appropriate existing fields or case history.
2. Use View all Cases when the recent panel is insufficient. Review open commitments and recent resolutions for recurrence.
3. Identify the affected assets or product context and compare the facts across cases. Retain separate cases when they need separate owners, access or promises.
4. Agree who communicates with each contact. Record the next actions in the cases, not only in meeting notes.
5. Correct outdated customer details through the record editor so the next agent does not have to discover the correction in a note.

Before merging duplicates, identify the survivor and compare its customer settings and linked history. The merge controls distinguish the Company to keep or Contact to keep; review that choice before the final Merge Companies or Merge Contacts confirmation. A parent company and its subsidiary are not duplicates solely because the names overlap.

Common customer-data problems

Continue learning

• Manage contacts and customer portal access
• Manage companies and customer organization details
• Configure company and contact field policies
• Configure customer roles and visibility
• Understand assets and customer relationships
• Build views for account reviews