About Starting, Stopping and Transferring Service Using Customer Service Requests

The system is delivered with step-by-step processes to facilitate start, stopping and transferring service. A few different objects are used to comprise these processes. These objects are designed to work with each other – like a matched set.

A Process Flow Type controls the user experience by combining a series of panels that create the steps of the flow. The process flow guides the user to gather information based on configured business rule. It also orchestrates performing business logic contained in plug-in spots to progress the process flow. For example, it uses a chosen premise to then show the user the available services to start at that premise. Along the way, the process flow creates and interacts with an underlying transaction.

A Customer Service Request is a lifecycle-based transaction that is created by the process flow. The customer service request is comprised of a parent request and child objects to record, update, and provide processing for persons, accounts, service agreements, and premises. The customer service request lifecycle continues after the process flow is complete and until all associated services are activated, stopped, or canceled.

A Customer Service Request Type contains the business rules that the process flow and customer service request jointly interpret, apply, and enforce. The customer service request type’s business rules settings are called controls. They along with the plug-in spots, define the type’s behavior. Some configuration is used by the process flow and some by the customer service request. For example, the customer service request type has controls that impact the fields used to search for a person and a plug-in spot used to create pending start service agreements.