Overview of Contacts

Customer data is the foundation of B2C Service. It includes basic information such as a customer’s name, email address, and phone number, as well as information about customer service issues, opportunities, and marketing mailings opt-in status.

Every customer has a contact record in the knowledge base that contains information about the customer. But before you can understand contacts, you must first understand how contacts and organizations are associated and also how contacts are associated with incidents and opportunities.

The contact information you add and edit becomes part of your organization’s knowledge base and is shared with all staff members. If you are a sales representative, for example, you should know if a customer is having support issues before you try to close a sale. If you are a service agent, you can better help customers if you understand their past support questions. And if you work in marketing, you must know whether the customer prefers plain text or HTML email.

When customer information is kept up-to-date, the knowledge base provides complete information to your entire organization. The results make your job easier and provide a superior customer experience.

Familiarize yourself with the following points before adding or editing contacts.

• An organization is any business entity that has an organization record in the knowledge base. For example, organizations can refer to companies, divisions of companies, government agencies, educational institutions, or nonprofit associations.
• Contacts may or may not belong to an organization. If your customers are other organizations, you might have several contacts associated with an organization record. If, on the other hand, your customers are individuals rather than organizations, every contact record represents a unique customer. It is also possible that you have both organizations and contacts as customers.
• Each contact is associated with only one organization, but an organization can have many contacts. Each contact record displays all incidents, opportunities, tasks, surveys, marketing activity, attachments, and notes for the contact, as well as the audit log, which displays all activity for the contact record.
• Every incident must have a primary contact. If your profile gives you the appropriate permissions, you can change contact associations and delete contact records. Because these actions can have far-reaching consequences on incidents as well as opportunities, it is important to understand what happens when you make such changes.