Establishing Support Structure › Models › External Model

External Model

An external service desk supports customers who buy products or services from your company and have questions or problems with those products or services. In CA SDM, the issue is the basic unit of support when operating an external service desk. Issues are tickets designed to handle customer questions or problems and are oriented toward supporting products and services purchased by the customer.

If you are operating an external service desk:

• Review the customer access type using the administrative function of the web interface to see that it meets your needs. If most of your contacts are customers, you might want to set "customer" as the default access type.
• Review the customer contact type using the administrative function of the web interface to see that it meets your needs.
• Ensure that your contacts are set to have the appropriate access type and contact type. For example, if you set customer as the default access type, you also need to set the analyst contacts to the analyst access type.

  The contact type is usually assigned automatically based on how you create the contact, but in some cases, the contact type might not be defined. Customers who use your service desk for support should have a contact type of customer and analysts who operate the service desk should have a contact type of analyst.

  You can work with contacts using the administrative function of the web interface.

If you are operating an external service desk for which you are supporting customers, your support structure consists mostly of the issues that they create and the underlying supporting features of those issues. As the administrator, you need to set up the support structure using the information in the remainder of this chapter. Each topic states whether the information applies to your model.